DISCLAIMER: this is NOT a male-bashing commentary. It’s about living now when the times have changed and are changing.
It was a sign of the times: the men were the ones out front, publicly acknowledged, in charge of it all. Women were still supposed to be subservient, obeying their husbands, in the background, weighed down by a lot of social expectations. My mom, Elsie, was one of those women. She was “the Mrs,” not always having an identity of her own.
In 1960, pre-Kennedy and Camelot, pre-Civil Rights, pre-women’s movement, pre-The Pill, already the mother of two (in two years), my mom delivered a third baby, a boy. He was named Greg. And he died when he was just two months old. It was pneumonia, and in a single day’s time, life as we knew it changed. Greg was buried in the St Mary’s Cemetery in Bird Island, Minnesota, where both sets of my grandparents would someday be buried, many aunts and uncles and other family members and both of my parents would be buried. He was the first, tho.
There was no money for a headstone, I suppose, and he was a baby, so maybe he didn’t even warrant a full upright marker. He had what we called a footstone, and it was placed at what would eventually become the foot of my dad’s mom’s grave. I don’t know but I guess they had a family plot because grandma and grandpa and three of their four sons are all in the same small area.
Greg’s footstone has his name prominently displayed, followed by an equally prominent declaration that he was the son of Mr. and Mrs. LOUIS A WEYER. And then 1960-1960. Ever since I can remember, that stone has irked me. It just never felt right. Even though I was brought up in the same way as all my cousins and my friends were, meaning No Questions Asked, no explanations necessary, he includes she, and the men were the absolute head of the family. I wondered about that stone a lot over the years.
A year later my mom had another baby, a boy again, and two years after that, a girl came along, and three years later, another girl. My mom hardly had time to grieve, and although it wasn’t something we talked about, we always knew we had a brother Greg who had died as a baby. I was only two years old when he died, and I don’t remember that, but I do have a few memories from when I was maybe around 4 of my mom sitting in the kitchen near the window and crying. Just staring out the window and looking so very sad. That look never really left her. And I think I always felt a bit sad myself because of it. (I know I was about 4 because every time a baby was born, we moved to a bigger house, and I remember which house this happened in.)
My mom wasn’t the only one to lose a baby. It was much more common then than now. I had four other aunts who had lost babies – stillbirths, an illness, a cancer to a twin. And my mom herself had suffered the loss of one of her sisters in childbirth, and her own mother had a twin baby not survive a birth. Today we would probably think she had a built-in grief support group, but back then, I’m not so sure this was women talked about. I asked an aunt about this, and that’s what she told me – they just didn’t talk about it much.
As it happened, about 15 years later, my parents divorced. You know how it was then. Dad moved on and remarried within a year, and my mom had five children to raise. Plus she survived cancer…back when the Big C was usually a quick death sentence. In fact, she was told she had 6 months to live in 1978, and yet she didn’t die until 2002. She never drove a car (except that one time she nearly caused great bodily harm to my dad while he was gopher hunting), so she walked everywhere, year round. She supported herself and her kids with jobs as a short-order cook at a few local restaurants, cleaned other people’s houses, took in ironing and baked bread, and eventually did what she knew best – day care in her home. All five of her kids graduated high school, and while I went into the Army after high school, I eventually graduated college. My four siblings also all went to college. We aren’t some rags-to-riches story from a mom who saved dollar bills in a cigar box, but we all became self-supporting, socially conscious, and a strong family unit. We gave her 13 grandchildren. We still vacation together and some of us talk daily to each other, although we live in three (soon to be four) different states.
When my mom died, her headstone was carved to give her maiden and married names (she never remarried), and it reads “mom and grandma to many.” One of my dad’s brothers offered to let us have his plot for mom, which would place her near to my brother. But the cemetery (or the Divine) messed that up, and she is many rows away, although in the same section of the cemetery. Interestingly, she is next to a woman who was one of her high school friends, and across the road within the cemetery from where mom’s side of the family is buried – grandparents, aunts and uncles, etc.
So if I’m counting (which I’m not), it’s maybe been way more than 20 years that I’ve been seriously bothered that my mom’s name is not on my brother Greg’s marker. When my dad died, now 11 years ago, his urn was interred next to my brother. I loved my stepmom of 35 years, but I’m glad she was buried in her hometown and not next to my dad and brother, when my brother’s mother was not specifically name nor in close proximity.
I contacted the cemetery and asked about how to get some changes made. I’ve probably called them three or four times in the past ten years. I kept rationalizing that my mom must have agreed at some point to what Greg’s marker read, but I realize that she probably wasn’t even asked. And she never commented on it over the years that I knew of.
In today’s times, though, 65 years later, women are once again being diminished politically and socially. This time I’m fully aware of the impact. As a “senior” (and a widow), I am facing the double whammy of becoming invisible…waiting to be seated at a restaurant, having to insist on an appointment to have a vehicle issue checked out, asking the doctor for an explanation… you maybe know how it is.
So today, a few days before Mother’s Day, I’m taking one more step to balance the scales of justice. I have ordered a new footstone for Greg’s grave. It’s going to have my mother’s name on it, not just my father’s Mrs (especially since there were two of them!). And it will include is date of birth and date of death, so there will be an awareness that he had a family who had loved him for more than just a minute, that he was with us long enough that we were all changed because of him (those details are another post, if not a book). And he was his own person intrinsically, albeit a baby, not just a possession of his parents.
I like cemeteries. I visit my family at St Mary’s almost every time I return to Minnesota. I think they are peaceful places. And it forces me to slow down and consciously remember the “residents” – and me when they were here. Ironically, when my husband died, I did not inter his urn or remains in a cemetery; his ashes were sprinkled in places he loved, like Gettysburg and the Chesapeake Bay and a duck blind in South Dakota. I want to be cremated myself. I don’t think that placing bodies in boxes in vaults six feet under the ground is the best use of Mother Earth. It makes me pause to think there is no single place that people can come to remember me, so I need to come up with a solution for that maybe.
I don’t know if cemeteries will survive all the changes happening in the world. But for as long as St Mary’s is around, and as long as I can get there, I’ll stop by. And I’ll make sure to tell Greg about all he’s missed in my life, and that he knows his mother by name, and I’ll let Mom know she is remembered as Greg’s mom, too.
Solowingnow 