More Than Words Can Say

After six days of sun and fun (and wine) in Cornwall – more on that in a future post – I came home Wednesday night to do something I never thought I’d actually have to do: Write the inscription that will appear on my mother’s tombstone.

She died nearly three years ago, and the lack of a marker on her grave has been a family flashpoint. My grandmother – my mother’s mother – doesn’t think she should have to do it (and I agree) and I won’t get into all the theories I've come up with for why my father won't just get on with it. When I’ve brought up the subject in the past he asks for “suggestions” – his way of telling you that he is not going to do it unless you make the first move and then nag the heck out of him. I am the writer in the family, and as an inscription undeniably involves words, this is his way of pretending that he is doing it; he’s just delegated it. (Less than 12 hours after she died, I had to write her obituary, but that was because he didn’t think she needed to have one in the paper. The experience remains one of the most excruciating of my life. I don’t remember crying too much when I called friends to say she had died, but it took me more than a half hour to get through less than 100 words about her on the telephone with a stranger. And then they have to read it back to you to make sure it’s accurate!)

I never thought I’d actually have to write the tombstone inscription, though. Partly because it’s just not something I ever thought about anyone having to do (don’t you just check the boxes for “mother,” “daughter,” etc., fill in the years and the name and…?), and partly because it’s gone undone for so long (three years in December) I couldn’t imagine at what point it would become urgent. But somehow – maybe because my sister’s getting married; or maybe, more boringly, because I sometimes have these flashes of wanting to clear out my “to do” lists – it is.

With a family history as checkered as ours, it takes a surprisingly long time to write the less than 10 words that will appear – and that probably only we (my sister, father, grandmother and me) will ever read. In what order do we put “mother, daughter, wife?” (I have my own opinions.) Then there’s my problem with “dearly loved,” which sounds like the tombstone equivalent of words that you’d never speak; only write. (When’s the last time you said you “dearly loved” your mother?) So “much loved”? Then who knew (I didn’t until I started Googling) there was actually a reason to the symbols that appear on Jewish tombstones: women get a candle; men a Star of David? A broken branch means someone who died young. Is 61 considered young? Probably not for the purposes of this, but it certainly seems so to me.