Visiting

I went to see her.

Or for her to see me.

Or to clear the flowers surely rotten.

Actually I wondered, on the way there, Why. It was the last day of this awful year. And my birthday. And on my birthday she used to always hug me hard, or want to take me somewhere, or send me the funniest or loveliest card, or call, talk to me, ask about my day, my life, my wants. She was always light and laughter on this day, a day she always cared about more than I did. She would sing to me, or have something sung — once, she pressed a teddy bear that sung me a tune. Another time, a card arrived with Elvis on the front, and when I opened it, Elvis’ voice then rang out of a little speaker, saying, “Well I’d be nothing but a hound dog if I didn’t wish you a Happy Birthday…”

She’d want to see me today, I thought. Because she always did. Somehow this felt like the strongest reason, the strongest pull.

So I wore the shirt she said she loved seeing on me, so much, there towards the end. And over that I put on a coat, donned my hat, and ordered the Uber.

But all the way there, I struggled:

Was it stupid? Was there really any point?

Was I now the cliché? That image we see, the one in sad films?

Wouldn’t this really be just exactly what it was: visiting a stone?

~

At Brama VI, Gate 6 of Warsaw’s largest cemetery, there is a stand with flowers, with lanterns, with other such things to buy. These stands are at each of the gates, and also across the streets bordering the cemetery, which spans more than one hundred acres and holds the remains of more than one million people. Polish people love visiting the dead, and in Warsaw there are just so many dead, the city built on tragedy perhaps more so than triumph, so these stands, these little shops all around, are big business.

And I knew the routine, the proper things required to be A Good Polish Son. I’ve visited this cemetery countless times before but always with my grandmother, to visit my grandfather, and Babcia always showed me the way: buy some fresh flowers, some new lanterns on the way in. Come with a plastic bag to fill up with the old lanterns, the old flowers and fallen leaves.

Don’t forget the matches, or the cash.

“Czy moge pomóc?” Can I help, a lady asked as my eyes were scanning and landed on a little Christmas tree — just the kind of thing Mom would love, with little ornaments that shined, like her. “Ile to jest?” How much, I asked.

Thirty-six zloty.

Could I take that, and two of the lanterns, and could I also get three roses? (my grandmother’s move)

“Za zimno,” too cold, the woman said.

Ah. So I took the lanterns, the little tree. And went. I didn’t know the precise location, like every exact little turn as my grandmother knows, but I knew enough from the memory of those visits, those turns, basically how to get close, and then I would just look for her, for them (Mom, now beside her father and his family).

When I did find her, found it, her stone still unmarked, unengraved, I wept. Immediately, and violently, like a child, I wept.

~

But why.

The part of my brain that analyzes, analyzes always, wondered. And still it wonders.

I think part of it was the simple reality. That I was now the person visiting his loved one, who was now the stone. The emptiness of this, when you become the photo, or that person in that film, hits you coldly when you’re standing there inside of it, really for the first time, in that quiet.

I think part of it also was the shock of finding what looked like fresh flowers atop her grave, after being told it was too cold for the roses. Here were giant bouquets, and her name written on ribbons, and these flowers full of color. Had someone just visited? For Christmas maybe? I was astounded by the thought of such a gesture. But then, in the midst of my tears, my shaking, I looked closer and wait, there it was: the flowers were fake. They were thread and plastic. They were simply the flowers leftover from the funeral — flowers I didn’t realize then were fake. (as the funeral itself had in some ways felt)

I touched them all. All fake.

And this is when I began to laugh. When hysterical crying turned to hysterical laughter. And this will sound crazy, but just then I could feel her, there with me, laughing too. Or maybe it’s just that I knew she would have found it as funny as I did. In any case, this is how it really felt: like we were laughing again, together. At the absurdity of life. The surprises of it. The mistakes of it. The plastic.

Fuck, is anything real? I thought. I put the little Christmas tree I’d just purchased up to my nose. Sniffed. Thank God. The tree was real. And the laughter was real.

~

She loved cemeteries, Mom. Absolutely loved them. Especially Forest Lawn in L.A. This was her escape, even more so than any museum. And she loved to take me there when I was willing, and we’d go for little walks. She’d take me to Jimmy Stewart’s most modest grave, just a little table in the ground like most of the others, and she’d ask me then to do it, please, do it for her: do my impression of Jimmy Stewart. And I would. Right there, over his grave, I would be imitating Jimmy Stewart’s voice as I often did for her elsewhere, only now saying things about this being quite strange, meeting like this, and how do you do, and Mom would just be crying with laughter.

Then we would move on. We’d visit another of Mom’s favorite stops, the grave of Walt Disney, which was a little walled-in garden in the corner of another area. And nearby, one of her favorite musicians, Sam Cooke.

Then we’d walk past the mausoleum where other celebrities were (Michael Jackson, for example), but just squint through the stained-glass windows, because people like us weren’t allowed in.

And then we’d just go on walking. Reading more of the stones. Breathing in some of the air. And looking off from that hill into the distance, into the future.

She loved Forest Lawn so much that when she got sick, when we knew it was close, I asked her if she wanted to be there. Forever. That I would do this for her. But she surprised me, she said no, not really, she really didn’t care. She did not feel like she had to be in any specific place. So whatever I wanted, or whatever her mother wanted, that would be just fine.

And her mother, my grandmother, had wanted so badly for her to come home — home finally. Be here with her, with them.

So here she is. Back in the city where she was born and raised, and beside the father she adored and would still cry over, even at the very end of her own life.

~

I lit the lanterns and closed their lids. I placed one on my mother’s grave, and the other next to it, on my grandfather’s. I set down the little tree and wished them both a Merry Christmas, and I said this out loud. Yes, out loud. I told them I loved them. All the while that analytical part of my brain still battled: They’re not here…

But at some point then, I simply calmed down. And the analyzing calmed down. I thought less. Just felt, just breathed.

And it was so quiet. I could hear birds chirping from the empty branches of the wet winter trees. And I decided to leave the fake flowers, just resetting two of the bouquets that had been blown over by the wind, because at least her name was there within them, and this would be somehow better than just leaving her there, unmarked (the engraving of her stone would have to wait until spring, when it was warmer, I was later told).

I looked around. Just so many lanterns. Always I find myself moved at the remnants of all those visits. At the evidence of love, of loss, of missing. The cemeteries of Poland are so much more adorned with these remnants than cemeteries in America. In Poland people are always trying to remember. In America people are always trying to forget.

On the grave beside my mother’s I noticed the shattered glass from an old lantern, in pieces. My mother’s neighbors, they’d died long ago. In ‘37 and ‘41. Was someone still visiting? Or had this lantern just blown over, maybe, in a storm from the next grave over (which seemed very popular, covered with several more).

The Good Polish Son gene kicked in again. I went over to that grave. I cleaned the mess as best as I could, taking the shattered glass and placing it carefully in a bag. The red film from the glass was so old and wet that it came off on my fingertips, looking like blood. I needed to double check that it wasn’t, that I hadn’t cut myself. I hadn’t. Just more plastic.

~

Bye, Mom.

I said this, and left. Then my feet stopped on some muddy path, and I went back.

I realized then, or maybe after, maybe now, that there was something nice about being there. I think I understand it more now, why people go. Why they even affix benches to the foot of some of the graves, presumably for long sits.

Because after the tears, the laughter, the pain of it, there is at least reality there, to keep one company.

Since my mother died, for months now, I have been suffering from depression. I can’t sleep well, am so often awakened by nightmares, often involving her, of her being sick, and me trying to help but being unable to. Unable to stop it, or save her.

And I have tried to reenter myself into life, into conversations. Into some of the old places, the old habits. But they have felt so foreign, like things I am now forcing. I feel out of place within them. Within life. I feel that I’m here now with almost no point. And then I just fake it. Act. I try, but struggle.

Grief, real grief, is beyond anything I could have ever imagined. The loneliness of it is astounding.

But then there in the cemetery, within just the quiet, and with the stone — at least there, there is no acting. The coldness, the emptiness of it is at least something real. And maybe this is why it began to feel good to be there. Maybe this is why I went back and stayed longer.

Maybe going there was not just to visit her, or for her to see me, or to clean. Maybe it was just to be with my grief, with the pain, to spend time with it in a more honest and true way. Alone, yet accompanied by the reality. Without having to pretend.

Eventually I felt like I could breathe again. And when I finally did leave, I walked slowly through the crowded lanes of other stones, other names and other lanterns left. Mom was right. There really was something beautiful about cemeteries. This one also. I took some pictures, as often I do when I feel or see something, something I’d like to bottle.

And I found sadness in some of the graves neglected, or one that was crumbling.

And I found humor in the fact that a crow, or wrona in Polish, was eyeing me from a stone tablet just two graves over from a woman who’d been called Wronska.

I looked up at the bare trees, imagining them filled with green in a few months, when Mom’s name would be added. And saw also in the distance a plane rising up out of Chopin Airport, and recognized at once the upturned wingtips of the Lot Dreamliner as it made its climb and slow turn to the left, back towards America; this may well have been one of the Dreamliner flights to L.A. I thought of all the times I’d been on that plane, going to her. I thought also of when I picked up her ashes, and went immediately to LAX, to the foot of the runway as she instructed me to, to watch the planes land and take off as we used to. I thought of what she told me: “I always thought dying would be a lot like this. Like taking off in a plane.”

I emptied the old and shattered glass into a bin marked for glass. And left the way I came, through Brama VI, passing some of the others who were just then arriving, and stopping by that little stand.

I ordered my Uber. Then found someone else’s winter hat in the backseat, and handed it to the driver, who looked back with a regretful expression and then said in either a Ukrainian or Russian accent, “It was a pretty Ukrainian girl.” And smiled.

We drove away. At one point we almost got into a wreck, two cars slamming on the brakes just in time, and both drivers looking at the other through the glass with anger, with certainty it was the other person’s fault.

Now I was the one smiling, there in the back.

Horns. And lights. And left turns, rights. And traffic. And people just everywhere, just trying to get to somewhere else, before they too would end up as some etching, some stone.

Life.

“A skad pan jest?” I asked the driver at the end of the trip as we were pulling up to my destination. Because surely he wasn’t from here, nor was I.

“Uzbekistan,” he said.

“Aha. Amerykanin,” I said, pointing to myself.

Really! he said. He had a brother in St. Louis.

Nice. Well.

We eyed each other in that final moment, nodded, wished each other well. Two travelers, this one little journey now over.

I gave him five stars and added what Mom always, always insisted I should add: a tip.

Maybe soon I’ll go back.