(This is from my weekly newsletter “Finding Words in Hard Times” from last Thursday. Some of you have read it already. But Nancy said I could use it here, too.)

In the old days, Memorial Day included cemetery tours. As a child, when we lived in Minnesota, we’d visit the family cemetery in Webster (WI), or the family cemetery in Big Fork (MN). When I was eight, we moved to Carol Stream, in the western suburbs of Chicago. Quick trips to the family graves weren’t possible.  We’d visit when we could.

(BTW, I introduced Nancy to the family graves in Webster just before I proposed to her. She still didn’t know exactly what she was getting into.)

More recently, we took Nancy’s dad on a couple cemetery tours in Michigan: Rives Junction, Michigan Center, North Adams, Jonesville.

These days, we go to Greenlawn Cemetery here in Fort Wayne a couple times a year. It’s where our daughter, Kathryn, is buried.

Here’s the thing.

When it comes to cemetery visits, there’s not a right way or time, or number of times, or amount of time to stay or amount of sadness to feel.

Seriously. We’re each different in our history with the person, theological beliefs about bodies, accumulation of grief, and all manner of other factors. If you want to go every day, okay. If you choose to never go, okay. If you decorate, okay. If you don’t, okay.

Recently, I watched as the ashes of a grandfather were placed in a marker on a small rise. It’s across a cemetery pond from the place where the body of his infant grandson was buried a few years ago. Some of the family, including this grandfather, used to come to have “donuts with N___,” a way of remembering the little one. Now, some of the family will come to have “donuts with N___ and Opa”, telling stories to each other, sitting quietly, healing.

That’s not been my story. And there are too many mosquitos in the family cemetery in Wisconsin for more than a bite of a donut anyway.

But it’s possible that I’ll visit with Opa sometime, this man I only met once, alive. And maybe we’ll talk about cemeteries and the role of geography in grief.

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For the rest of this story, visit “Thinking about cemetery tours“