Janet Flora | Writer

        I HAVE NEVER BEEN TO THE CEMETERY TO VISIT MY PARENTS' GRAVE, even though Greenwood Cemetery in Brooklyn, where I was raised, is just a short distance from my apartment in downtown Manhattan. All four of my grandparents are buried there too.
         My parents died four years apart in the mid-’90s; my grandparents passed away one by one a decade before them. By the time my parents were buried there, the zigzag roads of Greenwood Cemetery and the smooth lake near my maternal grandmother and grandfather’s graves seemed like familiar terrain. The actual burial service of each of my parents and grandparents is stacked in my memory—a bit like their caskets are stacked in the ground—one on top of the other. There are moments that stand apart, like seeing my father cry for the first time at his mother’s graveside, with my mother and his brother on each side of him. And then when he stood at my mother’s opened grave without his wife or his brother, but instead between my sister and me. Then there are moments that blur together: family and friends dressed mostly in black, flowers that were transported from the funeral home in their own car to be left at the grave site to die soon too, the final prayers, ashes to ashes, the slight lowering of the casket into the ground, and then a toss of freshly turned soil.
         My mother passed away before my father; she was the only one of my parents or grandparents to be cremated. This was her wish. She also wished her ashes to be scattered in the Atlantic Ocean on a particular piece of beach in Fort Lauderdale, where she lived for the final 20 years of her life. I, too, would have preferred that and to have kept some of her ashes at home with me. That would have been an ongoing visit; or whenever I was at the ocean that, too, would be like a visit that would feel much more like time with her than any visit to a cemetery. But the Catholic Church only condones the burying of ashes. Before she died, my mother agreed to the burial to honor the wishes of my father, a devoted Catholic.
         After the burial of her remains, I began to sort through her possessions, looking for something tangible that I could keep at home: photos, a vase that had been given to her by my grandmother, items of jewelry. Two pink-gold wedding ring guards, thin like pieces of wire from 49 years of wear, were obvious treasures. But what I treasured more was a hairbrush and curler that still held strands of hair, a bra that smelled of her personal scent mixed with the White Shoulders fragrance she always wore. I put those items in a Ziploc Freezer Bag, hoping to preserve what was real and perhaps something else more ethereal.
         A month after she died, I began framing some of my favorite photos. There was the one of Mom, when she was five years old, in a summer pinafore standing at the entrance of Prospect Park in Brooklyn. And another of her sitting in our little, inflatable pool in between my sister, at six years old, and me, at two; the three of us smiling for the camera held by my dad. But when deciding where to place these newly framed pictures on my desk, which was already crowded with snapshots of my parents together—like their wedding photo and the group shot of the four of us on vacation in the Catskills and the one taken at their 45th wedding anniversary—I felt another bolt of angst sneak up like something suddenly startling me from behind. My father was still alive, but the couple, the unit I knew as my parents, was gone forever.
         My father would live another four years without my mother. He spent the last month of his life in a hospital room in Fort Lauderdale. I spent the last week of that month with him. Each day, walking down the hospital hall, the medicinal odor that was a combination of disinfectant and illness would stab at my nostrils. As I got closer to his room and heard the sound of his wheezing cough, I felt both tormented and relieved, not sure what I feared most—his dying or living. On the last morning of his life, he asked me to read him a prayer on page 7 from the book he kept on his night table. On the faded cover was a picture of the Virgin Mary, barefooted, standing on a cloud, eyes cast to heaven, hands clasped in prayer. As I read, he made the sign of the cross with a trembling hand made more cumbersome by a clothespin-like device attached to his finger that monitored his oxygen. After I finished reading, his lips were still moving silently in prayer, his eyes closed. I stayed with him until the morphine made him comfortable, and then I left to shower and change.
         When I returned two hours later, I noticed the odor in the hall now seemed familiar and soothing, his coughing had stopped, and the door to his hospital room was closed. Opening it, I found a young nurse at the foot of his bed. She told me he had passed away 10 minutes before. She told me he looked peaceful and smiled at her before he took his final breath. At first, I thought she was wrong, he hadn’t died yet; after all, he was still lying there. But then I realized something had changed. He wasn’t struggling to breathe, his body no longer served as a port for tubes, and the beeping of the monitors had been silenced.
         Seeing him but not being seen made me wonder which one of us still existed.
         The nurse left me alone with my father. I sat on his bed, rocking his still body in my arms, repeating over and over, “Daddy, I’m sorry I wasn’t here.” I released his body and smoothed the few hairs on his head. His skin was growing cold. I ran my hands down his arms, stopping to examine each bruise and sore caused by the countless injections he received throughout the month. I held his hand, closed my eyes, and waited, not sure what I was waiting for.
         Eventually I began taking off his jewelry. I put his miraculous medal around my neck and his watch on my wrist. The stainless steel band slipped down below my knuckles. Taking his hearing aid out of his ear, I kept turning it over in my hand, wondering if this would serve as a future memento. A security guard knocked on the door and brought me his wallet with a separate sheet listing its contents. I took out his driver’s license and stared at the picture of my smiling dad. There was a 20-dollar bill and two singles and several photographs: one of my parents together, taken just before my mom passed away, and a black-and-white snapshot of my sister and me dressed alike when we were toddlers. Afraid to disturb the order, I put the wallet in my purse. Finally, I stuffed everything he owned in the room in a bag the hospital supplied, marked “Personal Belongings.” I left it in his apartment and returned to New York.
         Back at Greenwood Cemetery for my dad’s burial, now it was just my sister and I standing shoulder to shoulder, looking down at his casket that would soon be lowered in the ground. My sister’s two children, our significant others, and friends stood just behind us. As we exited the cemetery, I saw a couple arriving with flowers in a vase to sit in front of a tombstone; I saw a woman in her forties with a broom, sweeping leaves away from another tombstone.
         After the funeral in New York, I returned to my father’s apartment in Fort Lauderdale. From the hospital bag, I took out the shirt he had last worn. Holding it up to my face, I breathed in deeply. It still smelled like him. Quickly, I ran for a Ziploc. Folding the shirt, I noticed a small pin on the breast pocket. It was a tiny, gold figure of Christ carrying a cross. He wore this pin on every shirt for as long as I could remember. I removed the pin and put it in a small, velvet-lined box that once held a ring he bought for my mother.
         Sitting on the floor in the living room examining documents, I discovered an envelope. Across the outside, in my mother’s handwriting, it read, “Just for Inspiration.” I found newspaper and magazine clippings, yellowed and creased with age. A small clipping began to tear as I unfolded it. Inside was a short poem, (author unknown) titled, “The Value Of A Smile,” which opened with these lines: “It costs nothing, but creates much.” There was a copy of Rudyard Kipling’s “If” and Mother’s Day cards from my sister and me. I sat there reading and rereading with a roll of tape, mending the tears. I wandered back into the bedroom. On my father’s bedside I found his rosary beads, the same black, pearly ones I used to try and wear as a necklace when I was little.
         When I returned home to my apartment, I put his rosary beads in the same box with the pin of Christ carrying a cross and put the box in my nightstand drawer. A few days later I brought the prayer on page 7 and “The Value Of A Smile” to a professional framer. They now sit on my desk next to their photographs.
         I think sometimes of the couple I saw at Greenwood Cemetery bringing a vase of flowers to the grave site and of the woman sweeping leaves away from the tombstone near my parents’ graves. I wonder if my parents’ names on their tombstones are visible or if they have been covered with leaves and debris. But on those days, rather than making a visit to the cemetery, bringing flowers, I wear my father’s miraculous medal on my neck and my mother’s pink-gold rings. And on Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, sometimes I open the Ziploc bags with his shirt and her bra and breathe in deeply.