Wait -- I Want To Pray To Grandmother, Too!

Friday night, before their walk, Mother told me that Father and she were going the next morning to see Grandmother's (Father's mother) grave.  When I and my brother and sister were younger and were still living in the Twin Cities, we would go out a couple times per year (I want to say around Mother's Day and her birthday, but I'm not sure of that at all) to see her grave as part of an evening that would wind up at a Chinese restaurant.  It wasn't a particularly ritualized thing: We would get there, burn incense, talk to her for a bit, then pray and pile back into the car.

When I was young I had no patience for even that ten-minute gathering.  With age, of course, I understand the passage of death and the meaning of life.  So it saddens me that we as a family have not gone out to see Grandmother in ages.  Moreover, I don't remember if the three of us (Father, Mother and me) have gone out to see her.  I kind of think they remember me being bored with sitting around her headstone and have concluded I just don't want to do that.  I didn't in the past, but I'd love to go with them now.  That saddens me further.  And I did not pipe up and ask if I could go with them, although they had to, um, get Father's teeth after dropping by the cemetery, so maybe tagging along would not have been a good idea.

Oh, and this is the same cemetery that I've visited a lot over the past year, because of the pandemic and my thoughts of death that came with it.  Went there Friday, in fact, the afternoon before Mother told me they were going to see her.  I park very close to where she rests.  I usually go up to her grave, say hi, walk across the cemetery to the mausoleum where my uncle's ashes rest and say hi to him, then walk back, bid Grandmother goodbye and drive off.  I get a good walk in with paying my respects.  But seeing the burnt and sometimes unburnt sticks of incense, sometimes I think that I should just that, by myself, when we used to do that as a family.  But then I forget that I need both incense and a lighter, and so I forget about doing that entirely.

Maybe not this time around.  I may not have a lighter, but I pick up matchbooks from restaurants and bars that still offer them.  Just realized that I have them.  And I may not be able to steal incense from my folks, but if there is a stick on her headstone that isn't fully burned down, maybe I could light a match and re-light it and that would, you know, count ... maybe?  Yeah, I'll do that.  And I'll do that today, when I'm acting as if I'm going to work.