The Ground Was Too Hard To Bury Grandma This Year

Dead people should be buried. And fast. Am I right?

My grandmother died in the fall, which in itself is not significant. What’s unusual is that we had to wait until spring for the ground to thaw so we could bury her. She wanted to be buried near my grandfather, who had been lying nearly forty years in some dirt in upstate New York.

Upstate New York, where the license plates should say: “Winters Kick Your Ass Here and the Ground is Too Frozen to Bury Your Grandma.” I often have wondered where she was “stored” during those months. Did she just hang out somewhere for a year? I ponder this as we near the end of our twenty-two-hour, nonstop drive from Georgia to bury my Grandma Davis. The car ride is long and annoyingly chatty, like the line in a supermarket checkout. It’s just Dad and me. My sister opted out of the trip, as usual. She tries to never do anything unpleasant.

I think about my grandmother the whole way. I think about how she was never remarried after Grandpa died and how she never even dated again. Then it hits me: basically, she hadn’t had sex in forty-five years. So, unless another patient at her nursing home managed to woo her there in the end, it was easy to deduce that she had been pretty hard up for the last half-century. Can you imagine? No good-time-lovin’ for Grams for quite a while. It occurs to me then, somewhere on I-95, that maybe I didn’t know my grandmother at all.

So what do I know about Mildred Vivian Reynolds Davis, whose life we will soon be celebrating? That is, just as soon as we get out of this damn car. (Don’t worry, the one thing I do know is that she had a good sense of humor and wouldn’t be pissed that one of her grandkids is talking about her death and funeral this way.)

The thought that I didn’t know my grandmother bothers me all along the white highway divider line the rest of the way up the coast, past the cemetery gates, into the parking lot, through the maze of white headstones and over to where I soon stand at the open hole in the ground. I look down into the dug-out rectangle in the earth. The sides of the hole look like chocolate layer cake and I wonder what the dirt tastes like.

I’m about to pay my respects to a woman I barely knew, but who shares my blood, and all I am thinking about is sinking my teeth into a gooey chunk of chocolate soil. That’s entirely inappropriate. An odd, troubling feeling sits in my belly; I feel guilty because I’m not sad enough. Why can’t I get sad enough? (Maybe, because the funeral’s happening almost a full dang year after she passed.) What if I can’t cry? I think. I stand there for a while and try to work up some tears for Dad’s sake, but nothing comes.

I mill about, tearless, making small talk with distant family members I barely know. My Uncle Jeff, my father’s older brother, pulls up with his wife, his three children and their significant others. I think about how my father must feel sadly underrepresented by his side of the family. I want to make myself bigger or morph into several people so that he won’t feel like there’s only one person by his side. When I look around at the melancholy faces of my cousins and others who’ve come here to remember Grandma’s life, everything is getting much too depressing for this beautiful day. “She was eighty-six. She led a full life traveling the world and teaching,” I want to say. “She didn’t want you to be sad.” But the truth is, I didn’t know her well enough to say that. Maybe she was the kind of woman who wanted you to be miserable that she was gone. Who knows?

My uncle moves to the undertaker and hands him a small box. The box has my grandmother’s ashes in it. She wanted to be buried next to my grandpa, but she also wanted to be cremated, so after some haggling, the family decided to bury the remains instead of scattering them. I take this show of grandma’s indecision as a possible inherited trait that makes us closer. I feel better. As the box moves nearer and nearer to its final resting place, it comes into view and I pause to take a clearer look at it.

“No shit!”  

Was that out loud?

It was.

The other family members look at me like I have just reinvented the words “black sheep.” I’m staring in amazement. What they don’t know is that I have just realized that same box containing my charred grandma sits in my bedroom at home. Only mine holds old dried flowers from prom, letters from friends and pictures I have as keepsakes. It’s a dark, polished wooden box with a brushed brass handle and a carved design on the lid.

It is definitely the same box. It’s from Pier One. My grandma is getting buried in a $35, crappy, wooden box from a home decorating store. My Uncle Jeff is burying his only mother in a box he picked up at a strip mall. I forget to feel guilty about not knowing my grandma or who she was and instead I start laughing. Hysterically. I can’t help but wish my sister were here. She would understand why I’ve cracked up, because I bought her the same box last Christmas after she told me she liked mine. My father looks at me like I’m certifiable. He has a look of complete shock on his face like I just…well, like I just laughed during his mother’s funeral. I try to stifle my chuckles, but that makes it worse. My father says to the group, “Forgive Stephanie. It’s just nervous laughter. Please continue with the service.”

I am nervous. The whole thing is nerve-wracking, a life coming to an end. But life is laughable, because whether we like it or not, someday we’re all going to end up in the ground in some crappy wooden box. And once we’re gone, does it really matter if what’s left over is in a bag, urn, box or fancy sarcophagus? What matters is now—the love, the living, and the laughter. 

Stephanie Davis is the editor of skirt! Atlanta. E-mail her at stephanie.davis@skirtatl.com.

~Stephanie Davis