The third time I answered my phone, it was my mother. Conversation went something like this:
"Do you remember where your grandparents are buried?"
"In Morgantown? Yes, there at the end of Madigan Avenue just before you get to--"
"I know that part. I am standing in the cemetery, but I can't find them anywhere. Do you know where they are?"
My mother lives about 250 miles from Morgantown, and she doesn't get up there often (at all). I don't either. The last time I made it there was the summer of 1994. I'm the only child of the interred couple's only child, who is also deceased. No one has been moving graves around. They have been there since 1989.
"Um, I think if you are standing on the street and look at the cemetery in quadrants, they will be in the back right quadrant."
Trudging sounds. Finally
"Oh, ok. Here they are. You were right."
I visited that grave more often before it was a grave -- back when it was a little spot if grass surrounded by graves. The cemetery was at the end of my grandparents' street, practically within sight of their house. I would ride my bike on the little avenues through the cemeteries (there were actually two smushed together), and their graveyard was on the way to the little ice cream store on the corner. The spot was a secret between my grandfather and me, though. He liked secrets.
The rest of the family would be walking to the ice cream store, or the ginkgo tree, or the grave of an 18th century ancestor, and my Grandfather would quietly pull me aside and show me this little plot of grass.
"I want you to know this is where we will be buried, but don't tell your Grandmother." He would say. By now, we are already walking back to join my parents and the others. My Grandmother was usually carrying on a monologue of who lived where just after the war, or she might be chatting with her cousin, the undertaker, who lived on their street.
I bet he knew my Grandfather's secret.
I always thought it was so weird that we couldn't all talk about this, but my Grandparents were unusual and sensitive, and they could only stand so much.
When they were girls, my grandmother and her sister were the victims of a prank involving the butcher's kids and some chicken heads buried under their swing set. As an adult, poultry never darkened her door; Christmas meant a beautiful roast or ham, never turkey. If you wanted to talk about chickens (even to ask why they crossed the road), you had to do it when she was out of the room.
Then there was my Grandfather, who had led an uncomfortable childhood, to put it mildly. I am not sure of its extent, because we never talked about it. He was a brilliant guy. He was a self taught woodworker, he taught himself to speak Italian, but when his father died, his mother made him quit school and get a job. It was May, 1938. He had three weeks left before graduation. He never got his diploma or his GED. My grandmother's high school and college yearbooks, doodled and signed all over by her friends, were hidden from him. She kept them in her underwear drawer. She showed them to me secretly one afternoon while my Grandfather was running errands. She grabbed them out of my hands when the garage door started it's mechanical drone.
"Let's put these away now," my Grandmother said in a patient tone that didn't quite hide the tension. Back into the dresser they went. I looked for the yearbooks when we absorbed their things after they had both died. They never turned up. I think my Grandfather burned them.
What was it about these two separate events that created my Grandparents' own special case of PTSD? I am never going to know; they died six months apart from bone cancer nearly 30 years ago. The unease and fragility certainly doesn't seem in character for members of the Greatest Generation.
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