MY MOTHER GOES TO THE CEMETERY

by Carla Schick

My mother is going again. She gathers up a brown grocery bag and puts a small red-handled shovel and a forked weeding tool inside the bag. I sit in front of the TV, legs folded under me, caring for my sisters who watch Saturday morning cartoons. At seven years old I find these cartoons too silly, but I am outvoted by my middle and youngest sisters when we decide what show to watch. My youngest sister is only one and doesn’t voice any opinions as she crawls in and out of my lap.

My mother is going again. She doesn’t stop to say good-bye. She eats breakfast at the kitchenette facing the wall. When she leaves, the door to the hallway slams behind her marking the boundary of our interior life and the exterior mysterious world she is entering, I’m startled by the bang and look up.

My mother leaves. It is September, beginning of the school year, third grade for me, just before the leaves turn red, orange and golden, just before Rosh Ha’Shanah. She wanders off as though she were on a journey, floating off, leaving everything that holds her down—family, cooking and cleaning the apartment each day. My dad stands in the kitchen’s doorway. He waves good-bye as she goes through the door without looking back. I ask my dad, Where is she going? To her parents’ grave, he responds. She goes every year before Rosh Ha’Shanah. Rosh Ha’Shanah, the New Year, harvest time if we were not an urban family. She goes before the High Holy days, before we eat challah with honey to bring us a sweet year, before we get together with my mother’s aunt’s family and all my cousins, before we gather to tell jokes and laugh, before Yom Kippur where we ask forgiveness and remember the dead. I want to know more about my mother’s father.

What can we know to remember if no one tells stories?
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Death is a secret, whispered over phone calls and behind closed doors. I can’t say when I knew that my mother’s parents had died young. Their deaths were a presence looming over each conversation, each run-in I had with my mother, each tear shed and each angry word. I can’t remember when my mother or father told us about my grandfather, who died when my mom was only eight years old. We just always knew, before we could speak or understand language.

My sisters and I never imagined asking too many questions.
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The details of the life of my grandfather were buried, thrown in a closet like the sewing kit no one ever used except with an emergency to replace a missing button. She’s going to her parents’ graves, my dad said. That’s all. I stare out the window, sitting on my knees on the couch, looking at the sky, and imagine her visiting her father’s grave hidden in a pauper’s cemetery: my mom getting on her knees to pull weeds from around his grave and placing them in the bag she used to carry the tools, on her knees pulling at the roots, not knowing which prayers to say or not say to her father. How do you pray for an atheist?
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She’s going again. And when she returns home, as the sun is lowering in the sky, and she prepares a dinner of leftover chicken and string beans, I enter her silence.
It’s September 1962, and I turn on the TV to watch the Mets lose again in this first year of being a team. My mother cooks, I set the table, my father and I talk about wins and losses, mostly losses.
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We were never allowed to visit the dead. On the bookshelf sits the only picture my mom has of her parents: their wedding photo. Two round faces peer joyfully out of a metal-based photo. I do not look like them with their straight wispy hair; only my eyes resemble theirs. I know their names, but not the warmth of their hugs.
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How can we learn to bless his burial place?

I am stuck here, as though I know the way to the overgrown cemetery with tall ancient trees, haunted by the voices of the dead. Who will recall these bodies as living beings, the deserted poor? What will hap- pen to the place that houses their bones as the caregivers themselves get old and die?

I, now older than my grandfather was when he died, need a marker to find my way back to him. When I once asked my mother, What kind of socialist was your father, she angrily replied, I don’t know. I don’t remember my father. All I have are stories relatives told me. All other relatives who could recall him are gone.

I write to spin stories from the remnants of memory.

The one story I know is how my mother would sit at her mother’s feet shortly after her father died. She said, I would think about my mother hugging me to give me comfort, but she was too tired and too sad to do more than work and cook after my father died. My grandmother, like my grandfather, sewed for a living; she made hats in a factory. My mother told me she had to sew corners of men’s handkerchiefs for 5 cents a dozen to earn money for her family; she was only eight years old.

In the end, my mother chose to draw instead of sew as her calling.

She wove stories through color and shape, through landscapes of creeks and dirt roads, the sun through pine trees, and the bouquets of yellow flowers she placed in an old ceramic jug she placed in her living room for decoration.

Through all her landscape paintings, I waited for her to reveal how she felt about this past.