close the gate

I just returned home from my annual trip to Rapid City, S.D., with the water ski team. It was, as always, a marvelous, fun-filled weekend where we perform a single show for about 4,000 people. There is a level of satisfaction that only a large crowd enjoying themselves can produce and we find it there year after year. 
On my way back east, I swing through Kimball, S.D., which is right off the interstate about 130 miles west of the Minnesota state line and where I store many fond memories from my childhood. It is where my dad’s folks lived until they went to heaven. It gives me a warm fuzzy feeling to stop by. 
The old two-story house is years gone and all that remains is a severely overgrown front walkway, but the apple trees in the yard which my dad and grandpa planted are alive and well. The lot where the house used to stand is always smaller than I remembered. It sits farther from the railroad tracks and closer to the electricity transformer station. Amazing how some things shrink over the years.
Grandpa died in 1973 and Grandma in 1978. They are buried there in the local cemetery and I visit there when I’m in town. My fingers absently trace the names on their gravestone as my mind drifts back to days of road hunting, fishing trips, skipping stones and laughter. I pull a few weeds, and even though they aren’t really there, I thank them for all the wonderful memories.  
In 1999 as I pulled into the cemetery, a fairly fresh gravesite caught my eye. I stopped to examine it and found it to be one of the saddest things I have ever seen. I never knew Tammy Jean, but to this very day I cannot help but weep for the husband, Roy, and the daughter, Katy, left behind. 
The headstone is huge and etched with pictures of husband and wife. Tammy died in 1998 at the young age of 32, which is now the age of our own daughter. 
The plot is outlined in scalloped brick and there is a large metal heart shape in the middle where flowers are planted into bare ground. The rest is covered in landscape rock with black plastic beneath to help keep the weeds out. There are a couple of small angel statues near the stone. 
The saddest part, besides her dying so young, are the letters etched on the stone, one from her husband and one from her parents. They are too personal to publish but trust me when I tell you they are heart-wrenching notes from devastated, grieving people. I cry every time I read them and you would, too.
Now I want you to know I don’t know a single circumstance about these people except what is printed on the stone, but as the years have passed — and this year in particular, for whatever reason — I notice the gravesite is not getting the attention it used to. Time marches on ... as it should.
So every year, as I pause to honor my grandparents, I check in on the condition of Tammy Jean’s resting place. I pull the ever-increasing number of weeds, straighten the statues, make sure the scalloped border is secure and water the purple petunias which I have always found planted in the heart-shaped center. 
And as I work, I pray ... I pray that joy find it’s way back into Roy’s life. I pray that Katy knows a love as great as her mother did when she was alive. And I pray that whoever plants the flowers year after year and then comes, on occasion but not like they used to, to check on them finds the site as tidy as I leave it. 
I’m sure the passengers in my car think my mission odd, as these are people I’ve never met. I weigh if it were me in a similar situation and I came to find what I once gave so much attention to had been neglected and crawling with Creeping Jenny and crab grass, guilt for having moved on would overpower me like weeds do flowers. No one needs that. Guilt is a powerful emotion which brings unnecessary pain to all involved and I’m just trying to prevent as much of it as I can ... even for strangers.
I’ll close the gate for Roy and Katy; life is for the living.
It doesn’t help that guilt is really a gift that keeps on giving.
 
Cleverly disguised as a responsible adult, I’m Nancy Kraayenhof.