Hope had a very beautiful entry in the Catholic carnival yesterday, about her stillborn brother.
A Song Not Scored For Breathing: For Rodney: “Because there was no headstone on Rodney’s grave I was given a number to look for in a certain section of the cemetery. Faced with a mass of green grass with circular cement markers hidden underneath, each one stamped with a number, I felt like I was looking for a needle in a haystack. After much searching I smoothed away the right patch of grass and matched the number on the paper with the number on the marker. ‘Have you been waiting for someone to come find you Rodney?’ I wondered. As I knelt down and traced the numbers with my fingers it was as if the waters of birth and grief rose up and I was overcome with big gulping sobs. I felt like I was crying a generation’s worth of pent up tears.”
In the cemetery where my baby is buried, babies are placed in chronological order. If you know about when the baby you are looking for died, it’s pretty easy to find about where the grave is. All of the grave markers, from the 1950s onward are the same size and shape. As I was looking at the graves in our babyland, I noticed many areas where there was enough room for a stone, but no stone. There was no reason or pattern for it. I asked once at the office about it and they director told me that those are unmarked graves. The parents for whatever reason did not get a marker for their babies.
As I read Hope’s story, she talked about how her mother was so devastated by the loss of this baby she did not even know where the baby was buried, or when his birthdate was. She has blocked all of that to protect herself from such a deep loss. I suspect that is true for a lot of the babies out in our cemetery; the grief and the loss was just too hard to deal with. Other babies got a grave marker but those graves are never visited, never cared for, never decorated. I don’t think it is because those babies are unloved or unwanted, or even really forgotten. I just think the mothers or fathers are just afraid of how painful it would be to visit there.
This time of year, because the stones are flat, we are allowed to put up little crosses and other decorations on the graves. Interestingly, little crosses appear over graves with no stones. Their parents, siblings, or someone knows exactly where the little unmarked grave is, and they decorate it with gusto for the holidays. I wonder about that too. My girlfriend’s little sister died when she was five years old and she told me it took her parents 30 years before they had a stone on her grave. By that time all of their other kids were out of the house and out of college and they had the money to do it. I think that might be the case with these little graves. They are not forgotten or unloved, there is just an expense with getting the stone on the grave.
In the four years that I have had a baby in the cemetery, there have been a few times when a brand new shiny stone has appeared on an older grave. The earth around there is dug up, and the stone sparkles with its newness compared to the older stones. I love that when it happens. I wish I could ask the family about the story of their little one, and about their determination to finally get the grave marked.
On Christmas eve our tradition has become to go to the cemetery and sprinkle glitter on Raphael’s grave and sing Silent Night. I always buy too much glitter and I start spreading it around. I try to share with little bare graves. Once when I was there doing this another family was visiting their baby and I told them what I was doing and they took some of their decoratins and put them on a little unmarked grave too. Kind of corny I know but somehow doing it just made us feel better. It isn’t a sad thing we do. In a way it’s a reminder of the communion of saints, and that the love we share doesn’t end with death. This is just one way to show it.
