Final connections

I was watching the movie, 'Elizabethtown' this morning, eating my breakfast, waiting for Cindy to wake up. I know that one of the main reasons I like that movie is the plot conceit of a young man going back home to his father's birthplace in Kentucky to deal with the passing of his father. He travels to Louisville, which he cannot pronounce, and then on to Elizabethtown. It would be somewhat similar to me flying back to Nashville to drive on to Hopkinsville or Clarksville for such a final task.

When the main character, Drew Baylor, finally arrives in Elizabethtown, after a few false starts which lead him to, among other places, a cornfield out in the country in the state of Indiana, he finds Elizabethtown to be a strange place where everyone seems to miss his father, always willing to help him fulfill his destiny. He pulls into the funeral home parking, to encounter a cousin he hasn't seen for a long time, a family he doesn't know, and people who have definite ideas about how his father should be remembered, all the way down to how and where he should be buried.

But the gang of cousins and uncles and aunts and other assorted relatives he encounters when he arrives simply remind me of the times when I found myself back in Hopkinsville, Kentucky or Clarksville, Tennessee, reunited briefly with the kith and kin of my childhood. Seeing the new additions to the family tree, who scream and run and play among the adults. Encountering the older people who seem to know you like you never left and of whom you have little clue as to their relationship to you.

I remember when my grandmother Gary (Dee Dee) died and her body was transported from Florida up to Hopkinsville for burial. We arrived in Clarksville to stay with my other grandmother, Grandmommie, at the farmhouse. It was Winter and the weather was freezing. On the morning of the funeral we drove up to Hopkinsville, parked in the funeral home parking lot and entered the funeral home. The atmosphere inside was stuffy and hot. Cindy and Kate and I sat out in the relative safety of the foyer, talking to close family members, until my cousin Carolyn led us up into the funeral chapel to see Dee for the last time. Cindy stiffened and I'm not sure what cultural oddity of dealing with death caused Carolyn to want to lead us up there, but I suppose it had to be done.

Finally, the funeral began and I could hear my female cousins crying in the family room off the chapel. Ed, Frank and I and the other pall bearers were sitting up front. I don't really remember the service at all. I just remember leaving the chapel and stepping out into the cold day outside, clad in suit, topcoat and gloves. I remember riding in the car and realizing how crisp and crystal clear the air was. I don't remember any traffic other than us.

I suppose someone might have stopped along the way in honor of the procession. I recognize now that as they stopped their day to give due to our grieving, they acknowledged a cultural connection to we riders in the cars heading toward the town cemetery, however tenuous. Words I might have uttered in the car as we drove through downtown Hopkinsville seemed inappropriate and insubstantial. Hollow. Nothing else was said, as I remember.

When we arrived at the cemetery, the clouds had replaced the former clarity of the day. We stepped out of the cars and down to where the hole for her grave had been dug. We stood and listened to the last words of the pastor from First Baptist of Hopkinsville (I assume). The casket was set down in the grave and I stepped back from the site. I glanced over the scene. There were mobile homes in a lot nearby. Not the prettiest scene to share for eternity. It was so cold and inhospitable. Everyone seemed to be in a hurry to leave.

As we left the cemetery, a spot where so many of my relatives from both sides of my family are buried, I noticed the historical marker for Edgar Cayce and another for the former occupation of the town by Confederate troops under Nathan Bedford Forrest. I remembered the old homeplace south of town where my grandmother grew up, Longview. Over time, it had become surrounded by mobile homes. I remembered the story of how my grandmother had pointed the home out to my cousin, Cicely, as the place in which she grew up. Cicely's reply? "Which trailer did you live in?"

The immodesty of time makes fools of us all. Lowers us into a place which we hope to avoid. But no one escapes the end that awaits us.

On a hill outside of Charlottesville, Virginia, lies the monument that Thomas Jefferson built for himself. Just below the house at Monticello, is the graveyard in which he is buried, along with various relatives. Here is a man whose very life was a testament to his greatness. Yet, as he lies in his grave, surrounded by relatives who wanted, like me, to touch and partake in that greatness by our simple blood connections, his memory is scarred in modernity with stories of his relationship with his slave mistress and his progeny.

Perhaps scarred is not the right term. For isn't it true that these descendants of our third president probably want nothing more than to seek acknowledgment of that blood connection to the great man himself? They want their place in this country to be established. Who would refuse them that? Not me.

Warts and all, we live our lives, and find a common rest in the earth from which we came. There can be some comfort in that. Take time to stop and ponder. We all deserve some notice from our brothers and sisters, children and grandchildren who live on beyond our passing.