White Crosses

Back in November of 2001, I was out on the job measuring State Route 168 for resurfacing. Where it intersects with US 221 there are seven white crosses on the side of the road, which represent two different wrecks, which killed seven people. All seven crosses are identical so I'm guessing at one point they were different and then someone came and replaced them, or something like that. But that day a woman drove up and parked on the shoulder of the road, took out a video camera, and filmed the crosses.

I had no idea who, or what she might be, so I went over to talk to her. She was crying, hardly able to hold the camera. She told me the story as if I weren't there. Her daughter and a friend had run the stop sign and been hit. Every year, on the day it happened, and on her daughter's birthday, she returned here.

I don't get it. Don't get me wrong here, if having those little white crosses out there and filming them every year is what gets that woman though the loss of a child I'll pay for her gas to go out there twice a year. A mother's heart is broken. Who is to say what will help mend, if anything? I stayed with her for a while, and she showed me pictures of the smiling young girl, still alive, happy, and still not reduced to a roadside marker and memory. Some people out there think the crosses ought to be illegal. I think they ought to spend a half hour out there with this woman, and then tell her she has to remove the cross that represents whatever it represents to her.

But I still don't get it.

I don't visit graves, cemeteries, or death sites. I like to visit old graveyards just to get good names for fictional characters, but as far as taking time out to go see where the bodies are buried, no, I don't do that. Ever.

My father kidnapped me once and took me to his mother's grave. My father is good for that, you know, kidnapping people. To get into the car with him is to be at his mercy and whim as to where you are going to go. It matter very little where you have to be, or want to be, or if you didn't want to go with him wherever he's going. "This won't take five minutes." He'll tell you as he heads off into the countryside, a friend's house, or to the cemetery. When we got to my grandmother's marker, a simple granite slab he started talking to her as if she were there, as if she could hear him, and perhaps she could. But all I saw was a simple stone slab, in a vast open field of stone, where very little life will ever return. I did not feel her presence. I did not have any sort of feeling at all except that my father really ought to quit kidnapping other people.

The way death is handled in this country is as unnatural as it is wasteful. We dress people up, we fill them with chemicals, we put them in giant boxes, then we put the giant boxes into another giant box, then we put those in a big hole in the ground and we cover it all with a stone of some sort. I know of no religion that teaches us that a dead body ought to be preserved in this manner. Worse yet, it costs a hell of a lot of money to bury someone in the manner that I've described. It's not bad enough that a family has to lose a loved one, but then they have to throw away the better part of ten grand to get the body into a state that involves weird chemicals and big boxes.

But this goes back to the woman and the white crosses. Everyone has got to find a way to deal with loss. I plan to be cremated and have my ashes dumped into The Swamp. Anyone wanting to visit me can do it in a canoe. I think that will help. Other than that, if I can find someone to bury me someplace without boxes or chemicals, I'll do it that way. Ashes to ashes, or dust to dust, I'll take a ride, on either long bus.

A friend of mine unburied the bones of her dog when she moved, and put them in a shoebox. She still keeps the bones, in the small box, in her closet. As much as I love Bert and Sam, when they enter the earth, that's where their bodies will stay. The memories of them will live always in my heart, but that is just until I too die one day.

Take Care,

Mike