When the Dead Tell Stories | TrishaLeigh.com

Memorial Day began as a way to honor the fallen Union and Confederate soldiers after the Civil War, but eventually expanded to inlude rememebeing fallen veterans of all military service.

Healy Cemetery (Cedar County, IA)

These days it also means family, bar-b-que, drinks, parties, vacation days, fireworks, and pretty much the beginning of summer in general. My family also uses the weekend as a time for remembering our personal forebearers, military or not, so we spent the Friday before Memorial Day trekking to multiple cemeteries in Iowa and Illinois. We brushed graves clean, leaving flowers in memorium of aunts, uncles, cousins, siblings, parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and?well, you get the idea.

I?ve had several people screw up their faces in confusion, and have heard most often, ?But why visit graves? Those people aren?t there.?

This is true. Whatever you believe about the afterlife or lack there of, the fact that a dead person in their grave will not be able to enjoy silk flowers seems to be a given.

So why do it?

Great Great Grandpa John Larson (Moscow, IA)

It?s about respect, I suppose. And honor and a simple tip of the hat to say hey, we remember this person, and they won?t be forgotten, no matter how many years pass. Not everyone who gave a great deal during their life passed away in military service, and this is our family?s way of honoring the sacrifices ? even the mundane, day-to-day ones like getting married, having babies, raising them, working hard, or putting dinner on the table ? those deceased human beings made so that I exist now, in this world.

It?s about saying thank you, and simply ?we remember.?

Great Uncle Charles (Tipton, IA)

My family hails from a part of the country where more people stay than go; growing up, marrying, living, and dying often in the same town. Even those who leave manage to find their way back in death, it seems, and generations are buried alongside one another ? at the farthest, in neighboring counties.

It?s the kind of place where this can happen: we were in the car, ready to leave Drury-Reynolds Cemetery in Rock Island, IL, and a car pulled up behind us. My dad looked in the rearview mirror, wondering aloud if they could be a relation. Before we could answer or ask, those people came up to our car, asking if we were relations?and we were.

That day I heard tales brand new to my ears. I watched my dad and his brother smile and laugh over the memory of how their grandfather, Art, used to poke them in the head with his stump of a finger to get them to sit still during a haircut. My mouth fell open in horror when my uncle relayed dragging a dead sow up to the house, dumping it in the trunk of a car, and hauling it into town to be butchered?right next door to a Dog ?n Suds. How my great-grandmother Rachael drove my dad nuts because she kept a bag of M&Ms out of a small boy?s reach, and how their dog Buddy used to run along the paper route, retreiving papers tossed onto customer?s porches. I ?met? relatives, learned where they were born, that they ran away from home, that they bootlegged whiskey, who they loved, how they died.

Harker Cemetery (Muscatine, IA)

The pure number of stories that lurk inside a single, country cemetery staggers me. Not only the ones my own family might tell, either. I didn?t expect to be fascinated, to so desperately wish I could know all of the tales the dead might whisper if they could. Beautiful, archaic names leapt of toppled, lime-covered headstones. Dates of birth within days of dates of death. Couples who left the world on the exact same day, men who died in WWII mere weeks before they could have returned home in victory. Parents who died without knowing their children, and certainly vice-versa. What happened to them? Were they sad, did they never get over losing a love? Were they happy? At peace? Funny, serious, walk with a limp, killer card players?

Baby Twins - Harker Cemetery (Muscatine, IA)

As a writer, the whole experience swelled my little ?pea-pickin heart,? as my mother?s family likes to say. The world is full of people, after all, and people will never run out of stories.

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