Gravestone Flowers

I paced my father’s hometown cemetery as he pushed and pulled his lawn mower through the overgrown grass, planted marigolds at strangers’ graves. I ripped dandelions with the savagery of a child who was Anne with an E and who pretended to be the one from Green Gables, who didn’t care to understand what it meant to be dead. I held the bouquet like a bride and trampled the wild blades, wondering why my dad cared at all to tend the plots of those decaying for a century. Now, with a longer life of collected memories, I know he’d always been the man to shovel his neighbor’s driveway in December, to walk at night with lightbulbs in his pockets to replace anyone’s burned out porch lamps while they slept, and he couldn’t let his parents’ bones lie in a graveyard replete with Jumanji canopies taking over the signs that someone once inhaled this town, that someone once exhaled this town.

Now I adorn my father’s grave with seashells, arrange them in a circle around a ceramic frog. I carry his funeral flowers like a baby in my arms, lay one at a time across barren graves near his. And maybe visiting strangers will be touched to see a lily, even desiccated from the sun, atop their loved one’s grave. Maybe this was my father’s sentiment too. Maybe he thought not of those who passed on, but of those who would pass by; they would know someone cared enough. Or maybe they would think it was their ancestors’ way of saying hi from the other side. And maybe, when you think about it, it was.