Seize the Moment

By TAD BARTIMUS

I visit the dead on Memorial Day to remind myself how to live the rest of the year. Caught up in petty feuds and unimportant chores, I sit on the grass and ask myself how to fill my allotted hours with more relevance, kindness and fun. It's not that I expect the cemetery's permanent inhabitants to answer; it's that their very presence here is a timely reminder that their fate will be mine one day.

Who were these people? Did they waste their lives? Did they use every second wisely?

As I watch all of the activity in a place not noted for it, I am reminded by the holiday crowd of my mother, who always cleaned up the house before the cleaning lady came. It's the same thing with tending graves on Memorial Day. There has to be a lot of mowing and trimming and weed-pulling before they can be adorned with flowers. It's the spade work that matters, not the decoration. Just like life.

Here there is only air, water, dirt. There are no elaborate cars, no shiny watches glinting in the sun. There are no trophy houses, only small slabs of marble and granite with a line here ("BELOVED FATHER AND GRANDFATHER"), a line there ("MISSED BY ALL WHO LOVE HER") to mark decades. Not a single diamond flashes fire, not a fur coat to warm dry bones. Who were these people? Did they waste their lives? Did they use every second wisely? At the end did they have regrets? Satisfaction? If I'm remembered for just one thing, as most of us are, what will it be?

I look out over the headstones and recall the stories:

Over there lies a man who always waited until hard times struck, then pulled out the suitcase he kept under the bed and went a-visitin'. "Want to sell?" he'd ask, and his hard-strapped neighbors usually did when they saw the pile of cash in the beat-up valise. Mr. Moneybags is not remembered fondly.

Under the big tree, a newly turned mound of earth is covered in Mason jars brought by a steady stream of pilgrims. Today there's also a rain-spattered envelope propped up on the metal marker. Its blurred ink reads "Happy Mother's Day in Heaven." It is unopened, probably an inconsequential detail to greeting card readers in heaven and the four orphans who left it here.

In a place surrounded by headstones carved with the same last name, there's one for "wife, mother, 1st Lt. World War II." Beyond, unopened beer cans stand in salute to a pal who lived too fast too often. Not far away, a photo of a broadly smiling boy adorns a monument with dates that surely can't be right. 1967-1983? Too young. What kind of sense can we make of that?

With the summer sun on my face I take a deep breath of clean air that smells like flowers, get up and stretch my agile limbs. I can admire the clouds, hear a thrush singing in a distant tree, anticipate the taste of the afternoon picnic to come. Unlike those I came to visit, I get to leave this cemetery and pick up the routine of a full life. I always arrive here thinking that's my right; when I leave, having walked among the graves, I understand once again that it's a privilege. I am aware for how much longer, I wonder, that I must heed the epitaph of a woman whose marker reveals she didn't get to live as long as I have: "SEIZE THE MOMENT."

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