Cemetery Hopping and the Art of Material Affection

I have a habit of tucking things away.

Four generations (circa 2007)

Not everything. I’m actually more of a read-it-and-throw-it-in-the-recycling-bin kind of person most of the time. But throughout my life, there have been certain things I saved anyway.

Cards. Letters. Notes. A few newspaper clippings. Things I wasn’t attached to at the time, but trusted that I might be someday. So I stash them away.

I think I write the same way, because I don’t spend much time thinking about who is reading the words right now. Once written, they go where they’re supposed to go. Maybe next week. Maybe ten years from now. Maybe never. But they were given a chance to.

I’ve always trusted that kind of timing.

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And that’s how I found myself recently sitting on the floor surrounded by boxes of old photographs that had followed me through multiple moves and different versions of my life, looking for a picture from my college graduation.

Thirty-one years later and I realized I couldn’t remember a single detail from that day anymore. Not the weather. Not who stood next to me. Not what I felt walking across the stage.

I wanted photographic proof the day had actually happened.

While searching, I found a card.

White with a red heart on the front.

It was from my grandmother.

My maternal grandmother died a few years ago, and I miss her. She was an extraordinary woman in every way. But she was never the grandmother I associated most naturally with softness or sweetness (although she did make the best Christmas cookies).

I had another grandmother who embodied that kind of love effortlessly. Warmth. Nurturing. Hugs. Comfort. Patience.

This grandmother loved differently. Or at least that’s how I understood her for most of my life.

She loved through action. Through doing. Through showing up. Through movement. She didn’t sit still for very long. Literally or figuratively.

And when you know her story, it makes perfect sense.

She grew up the eldest daughter of Wisconsin dairy farmers during the Depression, helping raise younger siblings and working the farm before becoming a teenage mother herself and eventually being kicked off the farm.

By 32 she was divorced, raising five children alone while her ex-husband spiraled through alcoholism and all the instability and violence that came with it.

And then, she built a life anyway.

She worked factory jobs at all hours, often balancing survival and caregiving at the exact same time. She earned her GED at 40, became the first female foreman on the manufacturing floor at Kohler, bought property, and spent decades advocating for women and children living in poverty and survivors of domestic abuse.

She had a way of showing up for people the way no one had shown up for her.

And that’s why her memorial service was standing room only.

Even her cards arrived with a kind of consistency I took for granted. Birthdays never passed without one (and it never arrived late). Usually typed. Even the checks tucked inside were typed once upon a time.

Before arthritis changed her hands, she typed everything.

I don’t remember exactly when that stopped.

But the cards never did. Not even near the end.

The card I found was from 1997.

My grandma, newly married

I’m sure I read the card when it arrived in 1997. Back then, it was mostly what seemed like ordinary communication. Plans for a visit. Excitement about things we might do together.

A few years earlier I had moved east, and at least on paper, my life looked exciting. I was young, independent, and life was full of possibility.

But I also remember feeling untethered and vulnerable during that time. A little disconnected from myself. Like I was floating through a life without having one. I would visit places like I was scoping them or checking them out so that someday, when I had a real life, I could come back and actually experience them. Weird, I know.

So when my grandmother said she wanted to come visit and see a few things in the area, I remember genuinely looking forward to it.

Inside the card she had typed out a list of things she hoped we could do together while she was there.

More than anything, she wanted to go to Ellis Island.

So we did.

We took the train into the city from Connecticut into Grand Central, a place that had already started to feel routine to me by then.

We caught a cab (this was in the days before Uber) and stood among tourists waiting to hop on to the ferry, the one that passes the Statue of Liberty, to arrive at Ellis Island.

Once we arrived, I remember walking through the halls feeling like it was going to take forever because my grandmother stopped to read absolutely everything.

But then again, she had waited a long time to get there.

Don’t get me wrong, at 24 I thought Ellis Island was interesting. Now I think about what it must have felt like for my grandmother, pushing 70, finally seeing places she had only read about or seen on television.

Because at 24, I was living on the East Coast, moving through New York City without thinking much about it. At 24, my grandmother was raising children in poverty with an abusive alcoholic husband and trying to survive.

Places that felt accessible to me probably felt extraordinary to her, and only a generation or two separated us.

And she loved history. So much so that we had a family tradition we called “cemetery hopping.”

As kids, my cousins and I would get piled into her brown VW Rabbit and spend hot afternoons driving country roads from Waldo to Plymouth to Fond du Lac visiting the gravesites of our ancestors. She would talk excitedly about who they were, what spouse had died, children they had. Most were farmers with long German last names that barely fit across the stone.

At the time, completely normal to me. But I’m guessing most people’s childhood memories don’t involve poking around cemeteries with grandma.

And now, almost thirty years later, I’m holding that white card in my hands, the oversized red heart still bright against the front, and I suddenly understand why I had saved it all those years.

I hadn’t saved it for the woman I was at 24. I saved it for now.

I used to think my grandmother was better with action than affection.

Now I think action was her affection.

And that’s a strange thing about growing older yourself. Sometimes people keep revealing themselves to you long after they’re gone. In a way, your relationship with them hasn’t ended at all.

And sitting there on the floor surrounded by boxes that had followed me across decades of my life, I knew the card had arrived exactly when it was supposed to.