Amy's Folly: Decoration Day

I have a corner full of false flowers I need to make tidy. They are the stuffs for my annual offerings to our dead. Monday is Decoration Day, the day that my family observed the old custom of cleaning up the graves our dead and laying them fresh with new flowers. This year I have bought a radical excess of false flowers. They sit in tangled heaps where I left them in a corner and where they have reproached me for the last two weeks. I bought earlier this year than usual, wanting to find the best and having conceived a plan more ambitious than years prior. I am laying more than the usual offerings this time. I won’t just clean and decorate the graves we have in years most lately passed – my grandparents, my sister-in-law, and my uncle. I will reach back farther, and lay for my great-great-grandparents, my great-grandparents, and also for their lost infants. Those babies would have been my grandfather’s elder siblings had they lived more than the mere days fate meanly gave them. One is laid in our family cemetery, buried there by her own parents and for years marked only by a plain rock. The other is laid in a double-burial, with a distant uncle or cousin, in another small rural cemetery nearby. When families in our area could not afford a plot, they sometimes laid kin with kin, and that is how my great-grandparents buried their firstborn. I will place flowers for that infant boy and all the rest, at least this year.

My reproaching heap of false and admittedly somewhat garish flowers could be taken as testament to some old and unresolved discomfort with the facts of loss. Why, after all, resurrect for remembrance dead so long lately unremarked? Like people themselves, memory has a natural lifespan. The graves that wear flowers and tokens on Decoration Day are also the newest, their ornamentation a trace of “life” in those most lately dead. We decorate for those we can ourselves recall; the oldest parts of any cemetery are also the barest, for it is there where rest the dead who have died their second death, the end that comes when no one living knew you. In laying flowers for my distant kin, I will violate the natural order and bring back dead already gone. In my defense, I am lonely and could use the company.

For generations my family reliably observed Decoration Day the way it ought to be and always was. We did not just tidy graves but picnicked with our dead, gathered up in happy crowds around homemade food set up on clumsy tables brought to the graveyard for this purpose. But that has stopped, the tradition ended now with us.

I am in most ways a person without religion, yet I harbored a faithful commitment to Decoration Day. Some five years ago, I wrote a kind of essay in praise of it, of my family’s habitual and somewhat shambolic behavioral recitation of the archaic ways. I didn’t know it then, but when I wrote that little essay we had already celebrated our last such day in the graveyard. I have been in mourning ever since. If Decoration Day itself could have a grave, I would cut to the chase and lay all my false flowers there.

Sometimes it is just “the way of things” that things can’t last. Yet I find this wholly unsatisfying as an explanation, much less succor for a loss. “The way of things,” I find, is only ever cited in disappointment and sadness. At least, I can’t recall ever being told “it’s just the way of things” when good has been my lot. It is a phrase for consolation, not congratulation, a phrase for just those “things” we wouldn’t in our agency make so. Nonetheless, some of our late failures to observe Decoration Day might just be called “the way of things.” Some of the living who would otherwise walk the ancestral tracks and gather up at graves have been flung by fate away. Our neighborhood has been thinned out, the way most small farming communities have. As elders died, children sold up or had to find work elsewhere. So, too, some who might once have come have grown too aged and too frail to make their way there. These sorry facts are indeed just “the way of things,” however little that may please us. But while “the way of things” could but have thinned our ranks, it is the pandemic that finished us entire.

In May of 2020, as Decoration Day approached, my branch of the family tree agreed together that we ought not gather up. My parents and an uncle were all in that benighted class of those counted specially vulnerable, so caution seemed the better course. We would stay away and told the others of our kin of this decision. I do not know if they then gathered anyway, if they held tradition fast despite its risks. I only know they disagreed and deeply so. One cousin sent my parents a letter describing the pandemic as a “righteous culling” performed by God, a test of faith my parents then were failing. And so began a breach never yet mended. During those first several months of the pandemic, my kin divided and have stayed so. To be sure, we carry on a pretense of sociability when circumstance puts us together, but our days of sharing table, and of fond and cheerful intercourse have passed. I have a cousin that used reliably to stop and talk when he passed by our lane and saw us out. It is now a toss-up as to whether he will wave as he drives fast by.

When Decoration Day of 2021 arrived, my family did go up to the graveyard, laden with our picnic fare as we had done before. But none others then arrived. We carried on despite this, but the next year didn’t even try. That last effort had not felt the way it should: it felt not like a picnic or a ritual, but instead like a sorry, mundane lunch we had relocated up the hill. Decoration Day had been a day for sorrows shared, for continuity collectively asserted and with a bit of cheer. We abide, the Day had seemed to say, but can no longer say in earnest. So it is that I have come this year to try for resurrection, not of the Day but of my distant dead. I am already disappointed with my plan.

There is a story by Henry James – “The Altar of the Dead” it’s called. It’s about a man named Stransom who can’t let his dead lie. He begrudges living others their forgetfulness, their habit of just going on when death comes for one they love, and pities those, their dead, then left behind. Of these forgotten dead, he says, “they asked so little that they got, poor things, even less, and died again, died every day, of the hard usage of life.” Stransom doesn’t stop with pity, but engineers a chapel all his own. He sets upon an altar there a candle for each one he knows who dies, a humble thing that grows apace as Stransom ages and more of those he’s known now die. In short, he creates a religion all his own. And as such endeavors may be wont to do, it takes a turn toward odd. He begins to feel the sort of things he really never should, his accumulating dead becoming boon:

Various persons in whom his interest had not been intense drew closer to him by entering this company… There were hours at which he almost caught himself wishing that certain of his friends would now die, that he might establish with them in this manner a connection more charming than, as it happened, it was possible to enjoy with them in life.

As the years of Stransom’s life and his devotion pass, he is joined in his quixotic observance by another who would mourn, a woman with a loss about which he long speculates, only at belated last to learn the truth. Hers is a dead whom Stransom knew but for whom he had refused to lay a candle, a man who had wronged him and so had been excluded – Stransom with his altar now a god who levies judgment. And there the “religion” all his own must find its end, collapsed in ritual performed alongside, but never really shared, with another. There is a lesson here I’d like to heed if only I could make it out.

Stransom makes himself the keeper and the shepherd, his flock too dead then to resist. Where the living won’t be herded, the dead oblige and this just might be the problem. We can make of them what we will, and what we like. And we can make ourselves their hero, our attentions to them the fragile tether against their second and most final death. Grief can be a form of narcissism, remembrance just the same. This may be a fault made worse where dead are “known” but through stories handed down, where the dead one never knew in life itself can also never then be really missed. I can imagine with what sorrow my great-grandparents set their babies down into the earth, but neither those babes, nor the agony in which their spare days ended are mine in more than this. I did not know them, and I did not know their parents. They aren’t entirely abstractions, but they could be something like – ancestors whose land I work because they saw a babe at last survive, a baby grown to man and father, then grandfather and great-grandfather, then himself also to the grave. They are in this sense mine, but I want not to be a Stransom with it. I want not to keep them just because they’re dead while those still living have come to vex me so. Nor am I easy with the “system” I somehow now have made.

In my ancestral lineage in these parts, I have a considerable company of dead, but did not think to provision all with my false flowers. I drew some line arbitrary – I will go to that lonely little cemetery where the baby boy is laid but not some longer miles north to where my earliest kin round here are laid. I likewise wasn’t planning to lay anything for that great-uncle, the brother to whom my great-grandfather didn’t speak for years. Nor have I anything for cousins – once- and twice- and thrice-removed – those cousins I could call just “Legion.” One must draw a line somewhere, but really, where? And why? How does one avoid becoming like a god with it? At least the line I laid unthinking is, unlike Stransom’s, not a punitive gesture. But does it help that much to admit that it is budget, both of money and of spirit? Those false flowers, however garish and awful they appear, do not come cheap. As for spirit, I cannot really say why I think a budget must be kept, but so it is. One wants not to dilute one’s dead by making them too many. I can with a spirit somewhat hearty commend those dead who most directly led me where I am, to this homeplace where their feet and now mine most trod. My bigger problem, and the one I cannot solve, is not a misplaced hope for memorial heroics featuring myself as savior of my dead. My problem is with ritual itself, the way that one can neither keep nor make it all oneself.

Some years ago, at my university, the president laid into a concrete walkway a large medallion with the university’s seal. It was just that kind of thing that universities sometimes produce – a bit of self-exaltation and shared spirit meant to ornament a spot. But when the medallion was placed, the president announced that here was the start of a new “tradition” – no students should walk across the medallion until that day they graduate. This announcement failed utterly to do the trick intended. Undergraduates trod across that seal daily on their tired way to classes, unaware of the “tradition.” I myself biked over it every chance I got, just because I rejected then, and now, “tradition” installed by abrupt fiat. Not to be daunted in their effort, the university finally had hard iron pillars and chain fencing set around the seal. They roped it off, presumably the better to dramatically unleash this, our new “tradition,” on graduation day, when they would only then allow those qualified to step across and on it. As much as I disdained that effort, I have somehow stumbled into something like.

I could place my flowers now, or any day I choose. But I withhold them, leaving them in disordered piles as if they are a thing to be unleashed, as if I would thereby and only on my lonely Day reward my chosen dead like Stransom with his candles. My false flowers await the Day because I’m trying to make some salving new tradition where the one I’d want is lost. Our old tradition once, but no longer, made a sort of sense. We abided once, but no longer. We abide turned into I abide, but how, and as exactly what?