Navigating the Road of Grief

Elise's Grave on July 11th

Both of my parents passed away several years ago. They are both buried in the Kansas Veterans Cemetery located between Fort Riley and Manhattan. If you have never dealt with a cemetery before, working with a veterans cemetery is about as easy as it gets. You have very few choices to make. They tell you where your loved one will be located and work with your funeral home on all of the details of the burial. Shortly after the burial, I believe it was within a week for both of my parents, the headstone is placed and the area is sodded. The first time you go to visit the grave, there is very little sign that anything has taken place there except for a new marker with the name of your loved one attached. It was certainly not like that with Elise's grave and I have found myself unprepared for that many times.

The "easiest" sign of all of that is the grave marker or headstone. The funeral home was very up front with us that these have been taking a VERY long time to be placed since the pandemic began. We may be lucky to see it in place before we reach a year of her passing. Other than supply issues, there is no real reason why it should take a year for these to be placed.

So, with that, we did not return to the site of Elise's burial and all was beautiful and serene. Far from it. I have actually found the appearance of her grave to kind of mirror how I have been feeling as I navigate the road of grief. The first time I went to visit Elise's grave, it was a bare mound of dirt that was probably 18 inches high. It remained that way for a while. That mound was bare and heavy helping the ground below it to be settled. Every time I visited it was a harsh reminder of how fresh her death was for me. Like the ground, I was unsettled and the weight was sometimes a lot. Over time, the weight of it all forced me to make space and allow life to settle around me, whatever that looked like.

After a couple of months, the grounds crew scraped the top off of the mound and made it more level to the ground. This created a different look and feel. Not better......just different. As the ground cracked and settled more, the crew continued to add dirt and finally a little grass seed when spring came. Like many places, we had a really dry winter and spring. That lead to not much growth and a lot of ground cracking. Probably the same could be said for me. I never really felt too settled and I was often discovering cracks that I didn't anticipate.

With spring and the planting of grass seed, we started to see a little growth. However, the weeds are more hardy than the grass. There are a lot of bare spots, and A LOT of weeds, but there is growth. As you see in the picture above, it is kind of a sad sight today. I have expressed my frustrations with the guy in charge of the cemetery. It improved for a little bit, but not for long. Elise's grave is the only new grave in her section. Sadly it sticks out like a sore thumb.

Her grave is a direct reflection of how I feel many times nowadays. I know it is more of an inner feeling than a reality (at least I hope so!). As I have navigated the road of grief, I have been surprised by many of the things that stick out. I have been surprised by the weeds that have popped up. And, I have been surprised by the amount of time it takes to see even small progress. But, I know that progress is happening. Progress has not been beautiful or smooth. It has been full of weeds and sometimes ugly.

In the next month or so, summer will subside and fall will begin. At that time I can focus on making her plot look better. That is important to me. In the mean time, I'll continue to work on myself and see where that takes me.