I went up to Fort Snelling, the burial ground of the U.S. Armed Forces in Minnesota, over break and saw my dad’s grave. To be fair, it’s not really a grave. He was cremated and his urn was placed inside a huge vaulted structure resembling a sort of massive locker bank. His little name-plate is located on the bottom row in aisle 14. It says his name, his birthdate and deathdate, his rank within the USMC and then below everything else it says, “Beloved Father.” I had imagined a pretty gravestone among the rest of the thousands there, a gravestone amongst the grass and the trees but instead he is in a structure that any elementary student would recognize as a cubby hole with a door on the front. It’s hard to look at my dad as fitting in next to every one of those other markers and name-plates because he was never a person among the crowd for me. Running my fingers across his name, cut black into the white marble, reminded me of the way his hands used to have giant cracks and crevices in them. Granted, I was a young boy back then but I can remember running my hands over his and wondering where all of his skin had gone.
It’s hard to let go of something. It’s especially hard when you know that it will never come back.
