Last night was kind of a reality check for me, as I strolled throught the cemetary where a lot of my family is buried. I was out there because yesterday was the anniversary of my dad's death. Every year I go out on June 30th to pay my respects to someone I have no memory of. I was 2 when he died, so the only memory I have, be it vague, is my mom holdng me over his casket. I guess I told her "That's not my daddy", so she took me to another part of the funeral home until she took me home.....anyhow, even though I really have no memories of him, I go every year. I'm saddened more by the fact that I can't remember anything about him than by the fact that my father is dead.
My cousin Joey is buried nearby, and I still take his death hard. He and our cousin Cheryl died June 27, 1999, in a motorcycle accident near our grandmother's house. He lost control coming around a corner, hit a cement abbutment in the road, and he and Cheryl were thrown off the bike. I have trouble driving near that area to this day because all I remember is seeing where the police had marked each spot they hit as they bounced down the street, one of them off a tree...Cheryl was so badly messed up that she had to have a closed casket, and Joey just didn't look like himself.
The funeral was so sad...funerals are hard enough, but when it's a double funeral, and then Joey had military honors on top of it--flag over the casket, the playing of Taps--to this day I can't watch anything resembling it on tv. Now that particular part of my family sees me as very aloof and hard to get to know...I'm not, it's just they've never tried. So when I broke down at the cemetary after the funeral that day, no one understood why. My mom knew why:
A little over a month before the accident, Joey was home on a personal leave, so he stopped by the bar Mom manages and called me to come over for a drink. He was going through a bad time right then...about 3 months before as he was on a submarine near Kosovo, he got word that his stepson had been killed (he was about 9 years old, run over by an ice cream truck). The less than a month after that, his wife filed for divorce. He felt like he had no one at that time. He just wanted someone to rant to and get drunk with...then he asked me "If anything would happen to me, promise me you'll be at my funeral". I just looked at him in shock, told him not to talk like that, etc...etc...he just said "Don't worry, I'm not going to do anything stupid, but promise me you'll be there because I want to know someone that loves me will be there". I made that promise, but I never imagined that a month later I would be keeping it.
No one really knows about that conversation, except my mom and my sister. They also don't know that about a week after the funeral he came to me in a dream. Yeah, I know you're probably thinking " OK, she's a head case", but this is the honest truth. I was dreaming that I was telling a friend of his about what happened, only to realize it wasn't a friend I was talking to, it was Joey. He let me know he was ok and told me "You kept your promise" and hugged me...and then that was it.
I am a firm believer that our loved ones are always with us, but seeing the graves of all of them is just sad; it's the fact they won't be joking and laughing with us here in the physical plane anymore.
