Visiting

I realized yesterday that the thought "I'm going to visit my mom" has very different meaning now than it did, say, four or five months ago.  Last year it meant I was getting in the car and driving south about 30 minutes to a gated retirement community, pulling up to a house, ringing a doorbell, sitting on a couch or at the kitchen table.  Now, it means driving about the same distance but north, pulling through the always open gates of a cemetery, parking in front of a building that houses who knows how many people, and standing in front of a granite or marble wall that has her name and date of birth and death on it.  I can't hear her voice, or share a cup of coffee with her, or hear her talk about whatever movie or event they went to (or didn't go to but she wanted to go to) at the community club house.

I go to the cemetery because I have no where else to go.  I don't know where she is anymore and I miss her, I want to talk to her, but I don't know where she is so I go there.  I stand in front of where she's interred, and I cry, hoping that no one else will enter the building as my cries echo through the hall.  Yesterday I meandered a bit, as I know she would have, looking at the flowers and the names, some of them new.  There was one that stood out - it had at least one, if not two, adults interred and then at the bottom (with no dates) it said "Baby Stephen".  God, what a punch to the gut that was.  For a moment I thought - yeah, this sucks for me but it sucks a hell of a lot more for that baby's family to come here.  And its true; there's always someone worse off than you and it's hard to remember that when you're visiting your mom at the cemetery.