Widowed: If I Visit His Grave, Will It Help?

In the 1940s, in the tucked-away corner of Michigan where I spent summers as a child, it was OK to drop in on people without notice, to stop by.

That custom still held in the 1990s when I took the kids to Michigan to spend a week picking blueberries and swimming at the beach on Lake Michigan where I’d played as a child.

While we were there, I took to dropping in on my Aunt Dickie, who lived nearby in Pentwater. I dropped in on her once, twice, three times. Or was it four? I lost track.

Dickie was reaching the end of her years by then — she was born in 1915 — and I wasn’t sure she would still be alive the next time I flew in from California to this place where I had spent summers and she had spent her entire adult life, married to a local man, raising six children. So I stopped by Dickie’s house again and again, a morning here, an evening there, an afternoon there.

Dickie didn’t seem to notice or mind the frequency of my visits. Each time, I knocked on the screen door and walked in. Each time, she looked up from her easy chair and her book and offered me a Coke.

But I noticed. I kept coming back to her white frame house with its tall narrow windows, typical of houses built in the early 20th century, when keeping your house warm through the cold of winter trumped having a nice view from the kitchen sink.

One more time, I thought to myself as I showed up at her house, one more visit. Maybe this last one will be enough, and I’ll have enough of my Aunt Dickie to carry me through the coming years, when I’d have to make do without her.

Widowed: If I Visit His Grave, Will It Help?

And so it was, last weekend, five years after my husband’s death, that I paid a visit to his grave across the San Francisco Bay in Colma. He’s buried near the graves of his mother, his father, his sister, his older brother, his grandparents and, most tenderly, his great-grandmother Fanny, who died in 1881 at the age of 22 after giving birth to Jon’s grandfather.

Fanny died. Her baby lived. Jon and his siblings were born. They lived. They died.

I put bright pink camellias from my front yard — our front yard — on the graves of the people I had known. And I put one on Fanny’s grave.

I spent some time there among the Cook pines and the Monterey cypress trees and the acres of granite headstones standing at attention in rows. I said hello and good-bye to Jon’s family, each one.

And soon there was nothing more to do in this graveyard. I turned and headed to my car, but turned again and went back to Jon’s grave. Turned again to leave, only to retrace my steps one more time to the spot where my husband was buried, until at last I could convince myself that another moment of standing at Jon’s grave would not make a difference. It would not give me any more of Jon than I already had.

More about my first annual visit to Jon’s grave at, “Advice From Beyond the Grave — ‘Party On!'”  My third annual visit is recounted at “Widowed: He’s Pushing Up a Daisy.”

Stories from my upcoming book at, “Kids and Money — A Six-Year-Old Learns the Art of the Deal.”  Also, “Feminine, Feminist Pink.”