I clean headstones at the cemetery.

I clean headstones at the cemetery. It's very therapeutic.

It started when I first went to visit my dead child. I had blocked that part out of my memory, his gravesite, so I was searching. I remembered he was under a tree.

While I searched for his headstone, the traditional Jesus with a flock of little lambs, inlaid with copper, I think, (strange how I still can't remember)
I was taken by the beauty of the old headstones, the kind they don’t make anymore because they’re just too hard to mow around, you know? The marble headstones standing like testimonials. A dying tradition. They were so beatiful and peaceful.

Then I started to search through the ones on the ground, you know, the doormat headstones that are easy to mow and weed whack around. Because there are more important things to be done than tending to a gravesite.

Parks were created with cemetaries in mind. Did you know that? People use to spend an entire day with their dead. Picnic blankets would be spread and the children would run and play in the grass. Now we don't have the time. We have replaced works of arts with doormats because we have more imortant shit to do.

I could tell that no one tended to the doormat headstones and I felt some duty or perhaps I was stalling and didn't want to admit that I couldn't find my own sons headstone. I mean, what kind of mother doesn't know wher her child is buried? So I tended to the headstones as if it were a garden. Brushing dead leaves aside. Pulling crab grass. There were husbands and wives. Sons of the war! Spouses, sadly, still waiting. As I cleaned I said their names out loud. I don’t know why, but it made me feel better. Not so lost anymore, and neither were they.

And that's how it started.

I found my son. He was near a tree. His headstone bowed from the roots of the tree.