In the early 1990s, my mom and dad bought a small cabin in the woods of northern Wisconsin, about four hours from their home. Over the years it became exactly the retreat they hoped it would be, a place for slow boat rides and grilling in the summer, cross-country skiing, all-day fires, and crossword puzzles in the winter. Memories have attached themselves to the place like moss. There are reminders everywhere of long weekends long past, courtships that are now marriages well into their second decade, infants who learned to walk and then fish and then skate, and will leave for college before we know it.
Cabins are both delightful and demanding. Things that live in the woods want in. Hot summers and punishing winters play havoc with decking, shingles, and the cabin logs. Gravity and water do their relentless, dastardly work. And so for twenty-five years, my dad showed his love for the place by working on it, keeping it clean, raking hundreds of thousands of leaves, hauling and cutting up downed limbs by the dozen, calling in help when a task was beyond his abilities. As he got older the calls grew more frequent, but even during his last visit to the cabin, Christmas of 2014, he was shoveling wet, heavy snow off of the deck, fixing faulty switches, and hauling bags of water softener pellets down into the crawl space. This is the price he was willing to pay for the cabin that he loved and that he knew we loved too.
Since my father's death last April, the work of maintaining the cabin has fallen to my brothers and me. It is a labor of love, but it is definitely labor. My mom, my older brother, and I recently undertook the pre-Memorial Day ritual of preparing the cabin for summer. We spent the better part of four days atoning for sins hidden by the snow and being reminded in fairly forceful ways that Dad is really gone. (He knew the cabin and its workings better than anyone. It would be nice to know if the leaf blower has always been a piece of shit, or if something I did made it that way.) But the necessity of work also reminded us that life goes on. The world keeps spinning and, as it spins, it generates piles of rotting wood and dead ladybugs. It brings weeds that got whacked last summer back for more. It stuffs a single gutter line with fourteen pounds of the foliage that I admired in September, soaks it in rain water, and makes it revolting.
After declaring the cabin ready for another summer, my mom and I drove to Fort Snelling National Cemetery where Dad's remains are buried. (He served in the navy during the Vietnam War.) It was my first visit to Fort Snelling since the interment ceremony last fall and was thus my first encounter with his name on a white marble headstone. It wasn't easy. The cemetery is a beautiful place, but as Mom has said many times, seeing his name there makes it all so real, so final. We gave him some pinecones and some tiny violets from the woods, stood there bringing him up to speed on the lives of the grandkids, felt sadness and disbelief, and then walked back to the car.
During a recent interview with Terry Gross, novelist Richard Russo reflected on death, memory, and his relationship to cemeteries. He acknowledged that, while others certainly feel differently, standing in front of headstones etched with the names of people he loved makes him feel like an idiot. Those deceased friends and relatives are more tangibly present to him in other places, places like the cabin. I get it. And it may be that in some future state of sophistication or peace I will feel the same way. For now, when it comes to the intentional sacred spaces of cemeteries and the more personally sacred places that bear the marks of those we love, I'm a "both-and" person.
I am aware, painfully so, that my dad is not in either place. But the ways in which he is absent from them are quite different and oddly complementary, the one emphasizing, often beautifully and poignantly, his particularity, the other recalling, somewhat jarringly, the things he shared with the thousands of men and women who surround him. The one allowing us to take up the work that he did so well for so long, the other - and for this I am truly thankful this Memorial Day - allowing us to focus on him and ourselves, and to simply bring pinecones and violets from the woods.