Yesterday I stopped to visit my father’s lover, up on Silver Hill. My mother is where she would have wanted to rest forever, as she often told us because she would see across the valley to her house and watch over my father until he lay down once more forever by her side. I walked through St. Michael’s Cemetery and found so many aunts and uncles and one just recently added cousin, and all four grandparents—two of whom I’d never known. I don’t visit here as often as I did a year ago because I know she really isn’t home. And there is guilt tied in with wonder because I realize that my visits kept her here and not lurking in the rooms of my own house for since my childhood our physicality was the only wall that kept her from seeing some of what I really did and hid from a mother’s eyes. And lately my father doesn’t seem to see her as often in her bedroom anymore.
Before I left I thought of her eternal wish to watch us and turned from the charcoal granite to look out over the rolling hills but could not spot my childhood home. Trees that she had always loved had grown in ninety years to blot out the view and viewpoint.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology