Speaking of coffins...

What is it with me and ellipses of late? Perhaps it's replacement therapy for CAPS for EMPHASIS.

While watchin' me some TV this morning I was a little stunned by a commercial that came on for caskets. Did you know that funeral homes cannot legally refuse to use a casket that you buy at a factory outlet? Smart consumers, belly up! I have images of a coffin section in BJ's and Sam's Clubs across the nation. Wow.

It made me think of my Grandma Fabrizio, because I remember the day my mother returned from a visit in Syracuse to tell us that Grandma had bought caskets for herself and her husband, as well as burial plots for themselves and their two daughters in the Russian Orthodox cemetery (on seriously pitiful real estate, only rivaled in piteousness by the Jewish cemetery across the road). She had also had her teal (no shit) dress sent, the one she wore to my cousin's wedding in 1988, to the cleaner's for preservation and storage, and instructed my mother on the jewelry she preferred to wear.

How old was I? I must have been 12 or so... Some other season, we somehow ended up driving around Syracuse and my parents felt like visiting some ancestors in various cemeteries. Why do people do that?

Why go for a drive
just for a drive?
Why seek comfort from
cold stone?

Don't remember the poet. Just the lines. As I was sayin', I have this memory of sitting on a little hill by a huge tree next to my brother Dan. Could it have been Dan? He never sat still. Maybe the cemetery affected him. But there we sat, in the cemetery where my father's family was buried, Peaks and Barrs - blueblood types. It was a pretty place with rolling hills and orderly, white stones. Lots of those synthetic veteran rosette ribbons poked out at funny angles like perverse flowers.

My parents stood a little bit away from us, and my Mom said, with rather a hysterical little laugh, "Well, it's settled then, I can't die!"

Huh?

My dad put an arm around her and kissed her face or temple or ear...

The Russian Orthodox priest had resold my mother and aunt's plots. Someone else had been buried in them. If we had been in that cemetery I'm sure my brother and I would have leapt up to see the proof. As it was, we just sat quietly and looked at our shoes, and thought of our mother dying. She looks terrible in teal, and I wondered what she should wear. I had the sudden knowlege that it would be me, someday, instructed in what earrings she would prefer for the wake and whether they should be removed and kept as heirlooms before the burial.

She wore simple gold hoops, then. Every day. And a tiny gold charm with her monogram in a circle on a thin gold chain, and two emerald rings, simple bands with muddy stones, that my father had bought from whatever he scraped together in the years they struggled for luxuries. And there was this silky dress she had that emphasized her waist. Would anyone see her waist at the wake?