Memorial

[mrissa]

Every year for Memorial Day I get a little bag of M&Ms, and I eat them slowly.

My great-grandma Lingen used to send me letters at college and enclose $1 "for a treat." We both knew that what she really meant was "for M&Ms." They were her favorite. She was not always an easy person to be around, but you could almost always jolly her up if you brought her M&Ms: partly because she liked them, and partly because you had paid attention and remembered what she liked. In her last year or two, she was diabetic and couldn't have more than one or two, but she wanted to make sure I had some to enjoy anyway.

My Gran (Grandpa's mother) kept a covered dish of M&Ms on the desk in her dining room. She had M&Ms, mixed nuts, and old-fashioned gumdrops every time we got there. Sometimes also chocolate-covered peanuts, but always the basic three, and I don't like gumdrops. I remember that when they came out with red M&Ms, it was startling to see them at Gran's, because it was a change in one of the changeless things in life.

We aren't grave people, my family. From the time I was tiny, I knew that if something happened to me or my parents or my grandparents, we would be cremated and the ashes would be scattered (although my grandpa had a standing joke about large urns as "family burial plots"). Last year when markgritter's grandmother died, she was cremated. I believe the family planted a tree for her on the grounds of the school she loved. When we remember her, we do it with purple flowers around the house, with contributions to research the disease that took her from us.

What do you do in memory of people in your life? When do you do it?

ETA: I didn't mean in the immediate aftermath of their deaths, although if you want to tell me that, that's fine, too; funerary customs are interesting. What I meant is in your life in the months and years after your loved ones die.

Comments

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

I always have a great many things to say about M&Ms. I recall when the red ones were taken away in the first place, and what a grievous loss that was. And when they had a contest to vote for a new color (Blue, Purple, or Pink; Blue won and they lit up the Empire State Building with blue lights), but they never once mentioned that they would be removing the tan ones from the mix. You can't even get them from ColorWorks, which I think is a terrible decision. B. says you can't play Forced Busing without the tan ones.

All my relatives who have died are states and hundreds or thousands of miles away, so I don't go to the cemetery on Memorial Day.

K.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I don't know what Forced Busing is anyway, but it has to be better than Forced Bussing. The blue ones can't substitute, or whatever new thing they have? (I don't know; I haven't gotten my M&Ms yet today, but I heard they had another new color.)

[writingortyping.livejournal.com]

I have only ever been to two open-casket funerals and I can say definitively that I do not like them one bit. My father's side of the family is definitely cremate-and-scatter, my mother's is open-casket (as are my in-laws). When my grandmother died, we waited from spring until late summer to scatter her ashes, as she wanted to go into the Atlantic and "swim back to Norway." My family chartered a whale-watch boat off of Provincetown on Cape Cod and each family member had a little dixie cup of Gramie's ashes to throw into the sea. So the ocean and whales definitely remind me of Gramie. I also make my Julekage in memory of her every Christmas.

My Grandfather (on my Mom's side) was a hawk-nosed Dane with a piercing gaze, a gruff growl, and the softest heart imaginable. He would combine all three by glaring at me and growling, "I love you." I do that sometimes too, in memory of him.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Some counselors, pastors, etc. were taught that an open-casket funeral is necessary if at all possible, to provide the family with closure. I believe this was more common a generation or two ago. In any case, I don't feel any more "closed" with my Gran's open-casket funeral than any other funeral I've been to.

Whales and julekage are an extremely good combination.

[athenais.livejournal.com]

We have no family rituals associated with deaths. Depending on the family there may be a memorial service, but I have yet to attend one. We are always cremated. I don't know what happened to my mother's ashes; I know my sister was scandalized that Dad kept her urn stuck away on the top shelf of a closet for a few years instead of scattering the ashes.

I've only been to one funeral. It horrified me. I don't understand the rituals, and I don't want to eat after viewing a dead body, and I think it's all barbaric.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I always figured that eating after the funeral was more for the benefit of people who wanted to feed people than for the people being fed. When someone I love loses someone they love, my urge is to make them food.

Of course, when someone I love has something wonderful happen, my urge is also to make them food, so that may not signify.

[ckd]

See also "Mormon funeral potatoes" as discussed on Making Light some time ago.

[miz-hatbox.livejournal.com]

As I understand it, in the Jewish tradition you feed the mourners after a funeral to remind them that life goes on and you need to sustain yourself. It's customary to eat foods that are round (to symbolise the life cycle) like bagels, eggs, or lentils.

The coffin is plain wood and closed--after all the person, the soul, is not there so there's no point in looking.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

My experience of looking at my Gran in her open casket was that it emphasized that my Gran was no longer present, rather than detracting from that point. I see how other people might experience it differently, of course, and I'm not interested in having an open casket for close loved ones. But I don't think that the presence or absence of a soul is the only relevant factor.

[athenais.livejournal.com]

I know it is normal to bring food to a funeral for the meal afterwards. I believe it's traditional to provide food so the bereaved don't have to think about cooking for awhile during the first stages of loss. I just find it all very odd.

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

Funerals... wow, it's been a while. My dad's family is mostly his age and my mom's family is somehow hanging on forever.
We seem to be a cremation bunch. Ashes are scattered only in special times, and then the story is just as important as the ashes. My great-grandfather died when I was very little and was cremated. He and his wife loved their house; her ashes were still around. All the grandchildren, and I suppose the other people, milled about, mourned that they'd have to leave it... then thought, "Hey, no, that's not how we do things in this family!" So they got out the post-hole digger and put the happy couple by the garage.
After going through the ashes for chunks.
My dad's parents and brother are in my aunt's closet. It's not what we do with the physical bits, chunky or not so chunky; it's what we do with the stories.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I am a person who regarded the florist as though she'd grown a second head when she suggested that I get one bridal bouquet to toss and one to keep. I couldn't imagine keeping a bunch of dead flowers in the closet. The more so, I think, with dead relatives. But I guess I can see other, non-me people keeping the flowers, and so also perhaps the relatives.

[diatryma.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure why we keep them. When it's appropriate, we seem to get rid of them-- that sounds so harsh, though. It's been a while since I had to go to a funeral. The family had some adventures there ("Touch her!" Dad said to all the cousins at my grandma's funeral, and before then, there was my uncles, which involved embalming fluid and White-Out) but it's been a long time. I think we hold on to the ashes because we don't know what else to do with them.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I think I do know what you mean about appropriate, though: you don't want to dispose of your loved ones just to be done with it. That makes some sense to me, even though I'd probably tend to want to organize things right away, myself.

[adriennelily.livejournal.com]

My family has a little camp on a lake in upstate NY. It's everyone's favorite summer place, so whenever someone dies, we scatter the ashes in the lake, and then plant a lilac bush in the yard in their memory.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

My Gran had lilacs in her backyard, and she let me cut them for her and bring them into the house. Which is why we have lilacs in the bud vases here when they're in season, as last night.

[ellarien]

My father was buried in the local municipal cemetery. My mother prefers growing flowers on the grave to leaving dead ones, but on the morning after my sister's wedding she got up early to take the bride's bouquet -- and my bridesmaid's one -- down there.

I have a black-and-white photograph in my living room -- a young man in jacket and tie and glasses, grinning with uneven teeth; it's a copy of the one my mother had when they were courting, that she gave me for the frame when I was little and I gave her back in a new frame when he died. Every so often, probably more often at this time of year, I look at it and smile back.

[pameladean]

I don't do seasonal things. My maternal grandmother made me a quilt out of scraps; it has a quite clever head of a unicorn in patchwork, and it's hanging over the window behind my monitor. So I can think of her by looking up. For my brother Evan there's a dwarf Alberta spruce tree in the back yard. My grandfathers died so long ago that I don't often think of them any more, but the mere sight of a German restaurant will bring back one of them, and any mention of a glass eye the other. I think of David's father on his birthday.

P.

[miz-hatbox.livejournal.com]

On my maternal grandfather's birthday, we go out for Chinese food because his favorite food was Egg foo yung. For a good ten years after his death, egg foo yung was required fare (which gets challenging because Cantonese has fallen out of style in our area, and Hunan/Mandarin/Szechuan restaurants don't generally offer egg foo yung). Now we pretty much only go to one Chinese restaurant that does not offer egg foo yung, so we compromise by picking a dish that we know he would have liked.

On my dad's first birthday after he died we went out for dinner...I forget exactly where but something ethnic. He liked anything ethnic and exotic.

And as I mentioned in a previous, my paternal grandfather just passed away; in honor of his career as a shoe salesman I donated the rough cost for a plane ticket back east to a childrens' charity so they could buy shoes for kids who couldn't afford it.

Funny... so many men gone, but not the women.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

That's statistically not odd at all. I saw some of it in my own family. I had some really ornery long-lived great-great-uncles, but most of them came with really ornery long-lived great-great-aunts, whereas the converse was not true: the ornery long-lived aunties often didn't still have their corresponding uncles. I had all four great-grandmothers alive when I was born (though that didn't last long), but only one great-grandfather.

[ladysea.livejournal.com]

My dad was not really big into sweets. About once every 6 months he would eat a Milky Way, if he was in the mood.

However, he loved and adored Apple Pie. So instead of cake for his birthday we would make apple pie. My stepmother frequently just bought one, but when I was old enough to cook I took over making one.

So on April 1, if I can, I bake a homemade apple pie from scratch. It kinda helps me from being an emotional, sobbing wreck. On the day he died (Pearl Habor Day), I just accept the fact that I am still not able to cope, and cry as much as I want.


There are not many things I was able to do with my stepdad. He is one of the people who taught me how to cook, so I think of him often. I also donate money each time I see the Disabled Veterns selling Poppies. I carry the poppy in my purse. It has been just over a year since he died, so I made sure I was with my mom again on the date of his death, as I was with her when he passed away.


Both of them were cremated. My dad's ashes are with me, here at the house, as I have not had a chance to scatter his ashes where he wished. My stepdad's are with my mom at her home, for the same reason. And she is still too attached to let go of them.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Thank you for sharing that with me. Did your dad have a specific location in mind, or was it more a category of location (at the ocean, etc.)? You don't have to tell me what specific location. I was just wondering if there was one.

[ladysea.livejournal.com]

He had a specific place in Arizona or Nevada. However, my stepmother failed to tell me the name of it, and dad mentioned it once. My stepmother is not someone I can readily ask...as she left my father's ashes in a house she had abandoned.

My stepdad wanted to be scattered in the Atlantic Ocean.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

I hope you have the chance to do that for your stepdad, and I hope you figure out a good place in the desert for your dad even without your stepmother's help.

[porphyrin.livejournal.com]

We talk about them a lot with Robin.

Specifically, we talk about them in relation to things in the house. "This is something your great-grandfather Bush made."

And in relation to things we're doing. "Your great-grandmother Evans would have been so proud to see the way you are already playing baseball."

And we talk about them with each other; reliving the memories verbally, sharing them with each other, sharing them with our families. ("Remember the time that Grandpa Bush chucked his toolbox into the lake, and then had to take the triplane back to the mainland to get a new box of tools?!")

I never met my great-grandmother Valentine. But my father's stories, usually told while holding her old family Bible, her last corncob pipe, while watching eels bubble on the stove, or while sitting under an old clock she used to own-- those stories mean that I know her and love her, because my father does (did).

I hope someday that Roo will know and love those of our family who are gone, who he never got a chance to meet, in the same way.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

He's getting good at family relationships. He said to Mike last night, "Your daddy is my grandpa." Yep yep.

In some ways I feel like I know my grandmother who died three months before I was born. In other ways, I know I'm missing a lot of her. But as an adult, I really appreciate how my parents tried. With other family members, too, I can call up stories about people I've never met, and I love that.

I have sometimes told people I love that I also love the little kids they were before I met them. This sort of thing, modified, is how.

[merriehaskell.livejournal.com]

For the memory of my grandfather, I tell stories.

I also stop when I see a turtle crossing the road and move him to the other side.

[fiddledragon]

Grandpa Burke - for several years after the fact, I went to Church on Easter morning in rememberance of him, as he passed away on April 3, 1994 - Easter Sunday that year. I wanted to light a candle for him *at* Church, but it's harder and harder to find the bank of candles in a modern Catholic Church these days :(. Eventually, since I couldn't do what I wanted to do, and because I've always hated the crowds of people at Easter Mass, I started lighting a candle at home. I had a special candle for a while. I need a new candle.

I also light a candle for Grandpa Muggleton. But remembering him is a lot easier now that I have items from the farmhouse in my home. Seeing his chairs, and eventually as soon as we get the table in the house, seeing that mean so much to me. Remembering him, and the farm, and happy childhood memories. He passed away on September 23, 1999 - the day before Beena turned 3. I missed her birthday as I was in Ohio for his passing. I think that's another reason his passing is easier to handle. I was there when he passed away, holding his hand. There's more to that story, but we said our goodbyes, and I know he's at peace.

I didn't really know my Great Grandma Bush, and was barely aware of her passing. Same thing with Gram Matushek. Thankfully I have yet to deal with the passing of any other family members.