Graveyard Field Trips: A Memoir

Love is Stronger than Blood

Michigan, 2001

My great aunt Hilda turned ninety on the Fourth of July. It's hard for me to comprehend all that she's seen and survived. At the age of seven, she rode in a parade to celebrate the end of World War I. Then she survived the flu epidemic that killed two percent of the world's population. The year she turned nine, her mother died in childbirth. Hilda, as the eldest, raised her younger sisters and worked so they could be educated.

In the early 1950s, after decades as a spinster, Hilda married my mother's uncle Philip. Phil and Hilda lived in downtown Flint, where Phil sold paint for Bronson Fischer. When he turned sixty, Phil decided to buy a farm out in Durand, Michigan.

When I came into the picture, I thought Phil and Hilda had always lived on the farm. I remember picking grapes in the arbor near the old farmhouse, playing with the farm dog called Sir John — after Shakespeare's Falstaff — and plunking away on the piano in the parlor while the adults exclaimed over Hilda's wonderful cooking in the dining room.

As the 1970s drifted into the Eighties, Phil and Hilda sold the farm and moved into an apartment on the outskirts of Flint. That must have been difficult: trading the quiet of farm country to live on the margin of a freeway. I didn't realize that Phil was already sick with the cancer what would kill him. He hadn't wanted to leave Hilda alone in the country.

Uncle Phil's funeral was the first I'd ever attended. I don't remember much of it now, except that Hilda was extremely gracious, touched that my brother and I would take time off from school to come. How could we not? She was family.

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When I got serious about visiting graveyards, Hilda was the one to point me toward Lovejoy Cemetery in Durand, where the circus folk were buried. (That story is essay #1 in this book.)

I eventually asked where my grandfather — Phil's brother Giles — was buried. My grandmother and her second husband are buried down the road from the farm where I grew up. I knew that Grandpa Giles, my mother's father, lay elsewhere.

Caught off-guard by my question, Hilda was surprised that I'd never visited Giles's grave. Since no one ever suggested a field trip, I'd assumed he was buried far away, maybe in Virginia with his birth family. Hilda shook her head. Giles was buried near Phil and Alice, Phil's first wife.

The graveyard was in Monroe County, south of Ann Arbor, as far south as you can go in Michigan before crossing into Ohio. Organized after the War of 1812, Michigan's Monroe County was named for President James Monroe. The county used to be much larger, until part of it was ceded to Ohio in the bloodless "Michigan-Ohio War" of 1835-36. What's left is mostly farmland, green fields separated by remnants of the forest that once blanketed the state.

I asked Hilda if she'd like to go with me to visit the family graves. Somewhere in the planning stages, our duo became a trio: my mom decided to come along. She likes cemeteries well enough — she's always suggesting new ones for me to visit when I come home — but she doesn't believe that dead people continue to reside anywhere near their remains. By the time they're buried, she believes, the spirit has already moved on to its final reward. That allows her to enjoy the "sculpture park" aspect of a graveyard, but doesn't give her the resonance of visiting her loved ones.

The three of us sank into the refrigerated luxury of Mom's Buick and headed south. I settled in for a long ride, notebook on my knee to catch the family reminiscences.

Mom remembered a childhood visit to the sanitarium where Phil's first wife was treated for the tuberculosis which would eventually kill her. To protect them from contagion, children were not allowed into the hospital. Mom stood in the parking lot, waving as hard and cheerfully as she could when Aunt Alice came to the window.