—an excerpt—
A detour in the rental car to visit her brother’s grave in Courtenay. This would be her first visit there. She couldn’t attend the funeral back then, more than a decade earlier. Not that she couldn’t have taken a bereavement leave from work, or couldn’t have afforded the flights from Calgary to Vancouver, then to nearby Comox. But she couldn’t bring herself to be there, so much closer to the grief of the other living victims. She possessed no courage to commune with the mourners, no strength to stand with his widow, to look his young children in the eyes and try to explain what a drunk driver had just robbed them of… it seemed like a nightmare.
But she was here now, older and stronger, having just attended her mother’s celebration of life in Vancouver. The entire scenario felt odd because their parents had never believed in burials. Dad always said that graveyards were a shameful waste of land. And as years went by she saw nothing to dissuade her from agreeing with that opinion. The cemeteries she was familiar with were all in expansive, park-like settings, with
attractive placement of mature trees and shrubs, manicured lawns, paved pathways,
flower beds, fountains and statuary.
And yet they were seldom visited by the living, left empty save for the ghosts. All that infrastructure and no one alive to enjoy it. That’s why it had been such a shock, to hear that her brother was going to be buried in a plot purchased by his widow’s family. He died without a will, so that was their choice.
She bought some garden tools; a pair of gloves and a trowel in a small bucket. She guessed correctly that his place wouldn’t be in great shape. The property was well maintained in a general way, lawns closely mown and fertilized, trees trimmed and leaves raked. But individual memorials and monuments were required to be kept up by the loved ones left behind. And that was just her now.
She parked near a small building with a map of the graveyard posted on it. There was a weather proof guide book, listing the names of every deceased interred on the grounds, and a letter and number code that could be used to locate their exact spot. Off she went within the grid, stepping carefully amongst the plots in search of her brother.
