Years ago, as you probably remember, Memorial Day
was called Decoration Day and it wasn’t just for fallen soldiers. It recognized
all our loved ones who had died and encouraged us, for at least one day a year,
to be grave tenders.
Remember
“Decoration Day”?
That was the question Hadley Joy Morris-Whitfield
asked the girls.
“Decoration Day!” Mary Rose McGill smiled a wide
smile. “My father – when I was so young that I called him ‘Daddy,’ would drive
my mother and grandmother to every little cemetery where a relative was buried.
Mom and Grammie wore hats and dresses, even when the wind was so strong it blew
their hats off. I loved it because I could run around the old tombstones and we
always had a picnic lunch on a blanket under a big cottonwood tree right beside
my grandpa’s grave.”
“Decoration Day,” Marge Aaron said, changing her red
jeweled cane from one arm to the other. “It was a family reunion. We’d all
somehow end up at the same cemetery and meet a bunch of aunts and uncles and
cousins. Then we’d go to GrammaMama’s big house for supper.” She laughed. “It
wasn’t ‘dinner,’ it was supper.”
Dr. Robinson Leary joined in. “We only had one
cemetery to visit, the one here in North Omaha. My mom would take peonies and
iris from her garden and decorate four graves; her parents and dad’s parents.”
She paused. “Oh. And there was a baby – my grandmother’s first daughter – she would
have been my aunt.” Robbie looked sad. “All the rest of my family were buried
in the south where great=grandmother had been a servant; not a slave, a servant
on an old plantation.”
“My family won the artificial flower award,” Hadley
remarked. “All year long my mother and three aunts would shop for sales on
artificial flowers. In those days they were plastic and there were god-awful
plastic wreaths in big boxes. If you went upstairs to my aunts’ storage area,
it looked like Hobby Lobby on steroids.”
She smiled and looked at the other three. Cozy and
comfortable with coffee before them at Table 12 in the Meadow Lakes dining
room, they had just come back from the cemetery that cradled the bodies of
Hadley, Mary Rose and Robbie’s husbands. Marge’s husband was in an urn in her
apartment, so he was more privy to their conversation.
“And those
women competed with those plastic flowers!” Hadley continued. “Who could get the most? Who could decorate
first? My mother would tell them, every year, ‘Don’t put any flowers on my side
of the grave. I’m not there yet.” And she meant it. So of course they always decorated
her side just to make her mad.”
They were quiet for a minute or two, then Marge
spoke up. “My ashes are going into the urn with my husband’s. One of our
children will take it, but I’m leaving a note saying I want it decorated on Decoration
Day with a bouquet of dandelions like the kids used to pick for me.” She looked
at Robbie.
“Definitely the peonies and iris for my grave,” she said
with a sad smile as she remembered. “My mother used to pronounce it Pee OWE
nees.”
“If you’re still alive and able,” Mary Rose put in. “Bring
a blanket and have a picnic by my grave.”
Hadley was the last to speak. “I’ll be in an urn by
my husband in the mausoleum. And what do you think I want, BOOB Girl buddies?”
Her grin gave her away.
“Plastic flowers!” they all said together. Marge
reached over and poured more coffee into the four waiting cups.
