I’ve never visited my mother’s grave. Do I feel guilty about it? Yes. A little. Am I going to do something about it? No. I’ll unpack and process my feelings and then reaffirm with myself that I’m making the correct choice, but I’m not hopping on a plane to New York anytime soon to cry over a stone with her name on it.  

My brother and I decided to have my mom cremated when she died. The choice was easy and probably the result of attending the funerals of three grandparents. To my eyes as a child, when my grandpa and later my grandma died, their bodies didn’t look right. Something was off, like the person lying in the coffin was a replica, a wax statue, a clone gone wrong. Something was missing–their mouths were pressed into small false smiles to portray a look of peace, but the sparks of life that made those faces into my loved ones were absent. When grownups leaned down to kiss my grandparent in the coffin, it looked like they wanted to press in a real kiss, but their lips barely touched the deceased one’s cheek, like even they sensed this is not really her and couldn’t bring themselves to connect their skin to the cold layer of death covering their parent. Their parent was too deep underneath, or perhaps elsewhere. 

As a young adult I felt the same when we buried my last remaining grandparent, my dad’s mom. I took leave from the army in Texas and flew home for an open casket wake at the funeral home, then a full Catholic Mass followed by the burial at the cemetery. The wake was incredibly uncomfortable. That same artificial smell of lots of polyester, large vases of lilies, and whatever funeral homes use to try to cover the sweetened smell of a deceased body permeated the room. The carpets were thick so the staff could move silently and not disturb the bereaved, but the environment only made me feel more like I was in a place that wasn’t real, wasn’t quite right, like when you’re mid-nightmare and you start to catch on that you’re dreaming. 

The ceilings were low and people’s voices even lower as they mingled and one by one lined up for their turn to pray on the padded kneeler in front of my grandma’s coffin. Some finished with their sign of the cross and stood up to look closely at her, just one last time. 

I remember kneeling, feeling like the experience was the most awkward thing in the world and totally not what my grandma would’ve wanted. I didn’t pray. I breathed and waited for what I hoped was an acceptable amount of time to appear like I was praying. I thought about her–not my grandma lying so straight in the coffin with sprayed stiff white hair and caked on makeup, but my actual grandma, who saved her half pints of milk from the senior center for me and whose hug felt like the blissfully cool side of a soft pillow but with the strength and love of confident but slightly shaking older hands holding me close. 

It seemed like looking at her in the coffin made everyone feel worse and cry harder. We gathered in the room and looked at her like she was a dressed up Christmas tree, and it felt almost as cheap and disposable as getting rid of the tree in mid-January when the Christmas spirit is long gone.       

My parents took my brother and I to visit our grandparents’ graves frequently as children, especially on the anniversary of their deaths (after attending the Masses said in their honor) plus Christmas and Easter to bring hyacinths or poinsettias. They pulled weeds around the stones, and stood around in silence, usually ending with a long sigh, and something like “Okay. Miss you, Mom” before we left to go back to the car. As a child I walked amongst the other stones, noting the different colors of headstones, finding the ones that had extras like pictures of flowers carved in, reading the long Polish last names, and becoming weirdly invested in cataloging the birth and death dates of my grandparents’ cemetery neighbors. I remember my mom clearing leaves away from her father’s flat, military headstone, wanting to make sure he wasn’t covered. 

Did my grandpa care if leaves covered his name? Did my grandmother know if her hyacinth was pink or yellow? Did they only hear the “I miss you” if it was said while standing over their coffin buried below, or could they also hear it back home 45 minutes away? Did they count how many times we visited and quantify our love? Did it make my parents feel any better to drive almost an hour to stare at a stone and sigh?  

In elementary school my class took a field trip to our local funeral home. (Looking back I have no idea why we did this, and it moderately horrifies me now that adults considered it educational and useful for children.) Perhaps that field trip is where I picked up the memory and corresponding mental imagery that before the embalming process begins, the internal organs are removed and the body is stuffed with balled up newspaper to fill in the gaps. At my grandma’s funeral I couldn’t stop seeing this in my mind and almost wanted to press down firmly on her belly to see if I heard a crunching sound. This idea made her a shell, a stand-in, a replica badly trying to appear human on the outside by borrowing one of my grandma’s brightly colored suits. 

I was 11 when my grandpa died, and for his wake and funeral too much was added on–the shiny, polyester ruffled satin coffin lining resembled the interior of a cheap jewelry box, not the cozy soft bed in which one would hope to spend eternity. His body was more than slightly puffed from embalming fluid, hard and thick makeup caked on top of soft, elderly skin. He was positioned with hands folded, and it looked forced when it was supposed to appear peaceful. My grandpa was a shorter, sturdy, muscular guy–a WWII artillery vet who watched his little television with one white earbud attached so he could hear. He was a blue collar, regular guy–a builder and a carpenter who wore more or less a uniform of dark blue work pants and a fairly wrinkled button down collar shirt every day. He had a big smile for his family and the facial lines that came from a life of hard work but also joy. He smelled like newly sawn wood and the metal of tools in his garage. Seeing him in the coffin with perfectly even face makeup in a slick black suit was jarring and out of place.   

And so when my mom died and it was my turn to plan a funeral, I knew immediately I preferred cremation, and I believe my mom wished the same for herself. We didn’t plan a traditional wake, but instead used the large, open entryway of the church before her funeral Mass to bring in tables of coffee and doughnuts for people attending. My brother and I sent probably 400 or more pictures we had on our phones to Walgreens to print, and we taped them to display boards, which we stood up around the main church entryway so people could stroll through and look at our happy and silly memories and see my mom smiling, as they remembered her. It was last minute and certainly not fancy, but it was what we could manage and what felt right at the time. 

During the funeral Mass, my mom’s ashes stood on a small table up near the altar in a rosewood box carved with flowers. I agreed to let my brother take it home after, since he was driving. I had no interest in trying to split the ashes and bringing my mother in a box through the TSA security check when I flew back to the west coast. I know they are her ashes, that the ashes are her remains, and while I certainly have a high degree of respect for human remains, they just weren’t her. 

My mom’s death was unexpected, and her funeral was fairly rushed. As most funerals are, perhaps, since death can surprise us and life is busy in so many ways. I can’t recall why, but we didn’t bury my mom’s ashes in the cemetery next to her late husband at the same time as the funeral. We had to wait, and then being Western New York, as summer moved to fall and winter the ground froze so solidly that the priest at my mom’s church asked us to wait for the cemetery to thaw enough to have the interment ceremony. 

Before it happened, my brother let me know and asked if I planned to fly from Oregon back to New York for the official burial, and I declined. I didn’t need to be there. I didn’t want to be there. I didn’t want my mom in a little box, and I didn’t want to cry over that box being placed in the ground. I didn’t want to see soil cover it. 

I didn’t want to see her name with birth and death dates on a headstone. The selection and approval process for her stone was so quick. I did not want to linger over stone colors and carved pictures the way I did while exploring the cemetery as a child in my Easter dress. 

I just didn’t see the stone or that plot of dirt in the cemetery as particularly important. I cared about the spelling of her name and correct dates, but beyond that, the burial was merely a traditional formality for me. Yes, there is a place that holds my mom’s remains, but she is not there. She’s not in the dirt back in New York. I don’t have to fly there and stare at the ground to talk to her. She’s with me here, in my heart, and especially in my memories when I close my eyes. 

I recently came across a poem from the 1930s generally attributed to Mary Elizabeth Frye and often read at funerals that made me feel more at peace with my decision to not visit my mom’s grave:

Do not stand at my grave and weep.

I am not there. I do not sleep.

I am a thousand winds that blow.

I am the diamond glints on snow.

I am the sunlight on ripened grain.

I am the gentle autumn rain.

When you awaken in the morning’s hush

I am the swift uplifting rush

Of quiet birds in circled flight.

I am the soft stars that shine at night.

Do not stand at my grave and cry;

I am not there. I did not die.

~Mary Elizabeth Frye

I want to be clear that everyone grieves in their own way. Every person, family, and culture has their traditions and choices they make for the death and burial of their loved ones. Whether you choose an open or closed casket or cremation or anything else for your parent’s death and celebration of life or whatever ceremonies you maintain surrounding their passing, I respect and honor those. Whatever you choose to do, I think the most important part is to remain true to yourself and do whatever feels right to you. It can be so freeing to recognize that we don’t have to do things a certain way simply because that’s how it’s always been done. 

If you have lost a parent, I want you to feel good in your heart about how you move forward and choose to acknowledge their passing. This is a hard road, dear grieving friend, and I’m right there with you as you continue navigating it.