Adam Shaw- Creative Nonfiction

Memorial Day

Dad visited the cemetery on the west side of town each Memorial Day to see the graves of my half-brother and sister, both of whom died when they were little. My brother Isaac and I were born a decade or so after the loss of the others, from a different life of his, so he never asked us to come with. 

After Dad died, I told Isaac, we should make a point to visit his plot every Memorial Day. He agreed, but when May arrived, he texted to let me know that he’d picked up a couple extra work shifts, that he wouldn’t make it. I invited my half-sister Angie in his place.  

The three-hour drive north was nondescript in the way trips across the Midwest are—fields punctuated by fast food joints or adult video stores, billboards for college basketball programs, rows of crops if the season’s right. A chance to think about everything or ignore it all. 

In my passenger seat sat a ceramic piggy bank painted yellow speckled with swatches of blues and pinks like bruises. Half its handle cracked off, a myriad of cracks down its side from when I’d knocked it over as a teenager. It was my half-brother Mike’s, and Angie had asked if she could have it. I said of course and wondered if she was his sister and not his half-sister like I’d always assumed. This felt like the sort of thing I ought to know.

Angie texted me on the way up, told me she’d bring flowers for the gravesite. I hadn’t considered taking anything, raked my memories for a glimpse of what Dad used to take with him, but nothing had stuck. I saw his hunched shoulders disappearing through the brown door from the dining room to the garage, pulling it shut with a smack that reminded me of puckered lips. I stopped at a gas station once I was close and bought a Diet Coke, just one even though they were two for two bucks and Dad would have gotten both. 

It rained the day of Dad’s funeral, thick drops that hit you like a smooch you didn’t ask for, so heavy that the cemetery workers said the ground wasn’t fit to bury him in. Because of this, I’d never seen his plot, just the dot on the map. I parked near where I thought it was, amid an expanse of stones, flowers, wreaths. A woman on her knees pressed her forehead to the ground, kissed it. A little farther, an elderly couple cradling bouquets withdrew flowers one by one, set them on grave after grave after grave. 

Angie pulled up behind me. I grabbed the Diet Coke as we stepped out of our cars, and I asked her if she knew where to go. The pandemic or some other chaos had delayed granite production, so Dad didn’t have a marker, wouldn’t have one for another eighteen months. I walked toward a lumpy plot scattered with straw. Grass peeked up from it, short but full, and I pictured Dad pushing his spreader full of seed in rows across our front yard, back and forth, back and forth, following invisible lines. I pictured myself mowing my front yard—I don’t use seed, though I always mean to—and powering through in something close to rows, told myself I’d be better this year even though I knew I wouldn’t.

I told Angie I thought this was it, pointed to the small American flag I assumed had been placed for Dad’s military service. Angie suggested that we ask for help, joked that I shouldn’t leave a sweating bottle of Diet Coke on a random person’s grave, so we called the front office. A woman drove out in a golf cart, apologized for our loss, and read the names of nearby headstones into a walkie talkie as she paced the rows. Angie and I stayed near the lumpy one, unsure who else it could be but also aware that we didn’t know. A few minutes later, the woman came back, confirmed it was Dad. The markers are key, she said.

I looked at the headstone next to Dad’s, asked her what she meant. She kicked the ground to reveal a small square with four numbers. 

This opened up more questions, but I swallowed them. She received another call, turned and walked to her golf cart before I could thank her. 

Neither Angie nor I had done this before. My mom was dead but never buried, cremated per her wishes. Angie’s mom was still going, or I thought she was. I’d never met her. Angie broke the awkwardness by pointing out that Mike—not from Dad’s marriage to my mom or to Angie’s mom, but to his first wife—was buried three plots down, next to his mother, whom I’d met but didn’t know had died. Brain cancer, according to Google. I was never supposed to meet her, but we ended up in a play together at a church I attended in high school, a church other than Dad’s that I joined to spite him. Mom figured it out on opening night, and we never talked about it again. 

The plot between my dad’s and his ex-wife’s wasn’t family, at least as far as we could tell. I meant to write down the name but forgot, noted instead that I’d been right all along, that Angie wasn’t Mike’s sister but his half-sister. This comforted me in both knowing more but also in sharing a half-brother with her, that we were both just partially connected to him.

Angie set down her flowers, and I propped my Diet Coke against them. We made small talk. She’d just moved, found a place five minutes down the road. My wife was wrapping up chemo, appointments followed by infusions followed by crashes—days upon days of sleep, night sweats, hot flashes—followed by appointments. Angie told me the new place was nice. I told her my wife was doing well, all things considered, that the prognosis was looking up. We circled the topic at hand, got close but didn’t touch it, veiled it to avoid Dad’s weight loss, memory loss, his failure to thrive, as the death certificate had put it.   

I told Angie I think I’m going to stay a while; she said I’ll give you some time. I didn’t intend to run her off, but I wanted time to myself, even if I didn’t know what for. She asked if I wanted to visit our half-sister Danielle’s grave and I said no thanks. I knew even less about her than I did Mike. She nodded, and we hugged. She said it’s good to see you into my shoulder and I squeezed her a little harder, told her she could grab the piggy bank from my car on her way out. 

I sat on the grass once Angie left, but stumbled into a divot. I leaned back, and my hand slipped on another one, so I Googled how long does it take for a grave site to settle, learned that it depends on soil makeup, precipitation, the composition of vaults. I rubbed my hand across a lump as if petting a cat, but the earth wouldn’t smooth. I swept aside some straw to try another, unearthed a Snickers wrapper instead. 

The American flag fluttered in the breeze. The Diet Coke I’d propped up fell on the flowers, and I leaned over to fix them. Another gust picked up and I snapped a photo with my iPhone, slapped a filter on it and sent it to my siblings. Everything fell over again and I gave up and laid next to it. The sun shone so I could see the veins on the backs on my eyelids. Mounds jutted into my spine, the shoulder I’d torn during a hockey game. A rock or something grated against the back of my head. I wiggled to wear it down, but it didn’t do any good.

It was the closest I’d felt to him. I’d been closer—there were photos of me as an infant on his chest, my face resting in a pillow of his wooly hair, his hand supporting my ass. Photos of my arm around him at graduations, family reunions. There were hugs, but they were a bumping of chests, claps on the back to say we loved one another without actually being intimate. 

The earth separated us, a concrete vault and a steel casket below that, but in it I felt the crusty callouses on the bottoms of his fingers, the edges of his palms. Hands that held rifles in Vietnam, gripped motorcycle handlebars on country roads in Indiana, lifted steel in grimy factories. Hands I kissed as they dulled to grey in a hospital bed. I heard the slap of those hands on his belly full of frozen custard, or steaks, or biscuits and gravy, a subtle nod of approval for the meal he’d consumed. I inhaled the smell of him, Grey Flannel cologne he spritzed onto his wrists before trips to church. The crisp maltiness of Budweisers shared after Mom’s funeral.

I splayed out and rested my hands on the earth, let the grass and straw make their way between my fingers and bring bugs and dust and muck. I hummed in relief the way my daughter did when I rocked her to bed, the way I imagine I could have when I cried as an infant, Mike and Danielle and Angie and Isaac too, buried our heads in his chest as a child. I shushed the way I did when I rocked her, slackened to my own quiet rhythm, loosened into the lumps and scratches and divots and let them comfort me the best they could. 

And later that night, after the three-hour trek home, I did rock my daughter to bed, and she did hum, but she also asked me where I’d been, why I hadn’t been back for dinner. She asks me these sorts of questions every day, the sorts that delay having to sleep. I told her I visited Grandpa’s grave, that it’s far away, and she said I miss Grandpa. I asked her if she wanted to come next time, and she told me she did so I told her that she was welcome along whenever but that now it was bedtime. I kissed her and hugged her and shook my beard into the crook of her neck, held her that way until her breaths turned to snores, until mine did, too.

Adam Shaw's work has previously appeared in Pithead Chapel, Autofocus, Rejection Letters, and elsewhere. He lives with his wife and daughter in Louisville, Kentucky, and can be found online at theshawspot.com.