Memoir Beginning

 "Barbara, I found it.!"

    My brother called me from across the lush, overgrown grass and mostly obscured grave markers of Fort Lincoln Cemetery. 

    For the past twenty minutes he and I had been on a hunt in this long-established resting place in Brentwood, Maryland, right outside the District of Columbia.

    I looked up from the marker where I stood, scraping several cuttings-worth of dried grass from its face with my shoe, trying to find the name. So far I'd cleaned off dozens of markers with my foot, adn a few with my hands, quietly disappointed by each. A few swipes showed it either included letters that didn't fit my query, or dates of birth and death that didn't apply. Meanwhile, my brother searched as well, while rush hour traffic sped by on the other side of the iron fence, mostly moving east into Maryland's Prince Georgie's County suburbs or further into Ann Arundel and Calvert counties. 

    Satisfied and relieved to no longer kick grass and follow parallel lines of markers deep in the grass, I found my brother Donald several yards off and made my way through the uneven and somewhat unkempt lawn to where he stood. Yes, it was what we looked for. 

Salem Graham

Nov. 9, 1922  April 22, 1972

In Loving Memory

The grave of our father, who died at forty-nine from a sudden, piercing ischemic heart attack on a rainy Saturday morning in my junior year of high school. 

    We cleaned off the marker, pulling the weeds, swiping away the dead grass and strawish, dead vegetation. I took photos with my camera. The marker is green, and in the iPhone image it looks like tarnished brass, which I figure it is. 

    I realized I had never seen this marker, or at least I have no memory of it. The last time I would have stood in that spot, I would have been sixteen years old, naive and dumb as a rock, confused. It was three or four days after his death and we--my mother, my older brother, Donald, and I among various other family--were putting him in the ground. As we had done his father, my grandfather Isaac Newton Graham, two weeks before, in Deerfield, Virginia, where my father was born. Then, most of the family, the remaining of the twelve siblings, were there. Some had come to my father's funeral, three hours away. 

    My father had no middle name or initial. I once joked, tastelessly, that his parents were too poor to provide him a middle name, and I don't know if his eleven siblings did. They were born in the first decade of the 1900s through the 1920s. His parents, poor farmers in the Shenandoah Valley with the nearest big town being Staunton, apparently ran out of normal names and named by father after the Virginia town of Salem--or perhaps it is from the Bible, the kingdom of Melchizedek. 

    Dad left the farm at fourteen to move to Washington, D.C. or its environs for work. His older brother Forrest, whom he called Farst to my young ears, was already living here. Later he was, like millions, drafted into World War II service and shiped to England to drive a truck. At least that's what our parents told us. Mom and Dad either intentionally or unintentionally kept secrets they didn't think were secrets. They just did not tell us about themselves until we asked them point blank, and if we got past the dismissive hand or the "oh, you don't need to know that," we might have caught a nugget about past girlfriends or boyfriends, travels, achievements, or adventures. I spent most of my life thinking my parents led the most boring lives possible. I didn't know to ask the right questions and they were not disposed to let us know what they kept locked in their memories. Theirs was not a self-revelatory generation. 

    After the war, he met my mother, they married (she lying about her age), and in a year they had a baby boy. They lived in the Hyattsville area of Prince George's County all that time. My father had a drinking problem and became a devotee of AA. It worked for him. He went to those meetings several nights a week for us, although we did not know that at the time. 

***

    My brother and I stood and stared at the marker. Why had I never seen this? Oh, that is a long tale, one of attempted escape from memories. April 22, 1974. Try as I might, and I didn't try to forget the day, only its connection to who I am, I can't forget the snapshots and the sounds of that morning that changed everything about our family and my existence, my soul. 

    I looked at Donald. "What do you remember about that morning?" Again, a new question. 

    My brother is quiet, intelligent, and often surprising. He had recently started singing country music at a weekly community get-together on the South River near his home near Annapolis. His daughter and son-in law live in the Netherlands; and his son and daughter-in-law in Albuquerque; my son and his family live 20 minutes away from me. He keeps his opinions to himself. He travels a good deal, is semi-retired, and he worked for many years as a caretaker and guide in an early American mansion. I interviewed him for my podcast on creative people, a pleasure for me but he wasn't vocal about how he processed the experience. 

    He is twenty-two months younger than me, so we were close; our older brother, who is deceased, was eight years older than I and our younger brother, who is severely intellectually disabled and autistic and lives in a group home, is nine years younger than he. Donald and I are both blond and blue-eyed, and as children we were often mistaken for twins. 

    "I heard something, and I went into the kitchen where he was lying." That seems to be what is most clear tohim. He was fourteen, and his father was dead already on the kitchen floor. "I remember it seemed like the ambulance took forever to get there, but it wouldn't have mattered."

    "Mom said she heard a gurgling sound that woke her up," I recalled, "and she found him." For myself, I didn't remember anything but my mother crying int he living room. I did not go into the kitchen. Our older brother Gary, the ambulance workers, and the neighbors had some part in those disconnected and disjointed mental moving images. 

     It was also very early, perhaps five, definitely before six. My father was up early because we ran a paper route for the Washington Post. If the weather was bad, and it was that morning, he put the papers in an old Ford Falcon and drove us around to deliver them to the eighty to one hundred customers in the subdivision. If the weather was dry, Donald and I carried them in a Radio Flyer wagon, red of course. Delivering a morning paper, especially one the size of the Post and with its reputation, meant we ha to start early, at 5:00. A truck dropped the bundles off in front of our house, and it took us about an hour to finish the deliveries. Afterward we went to school during the week or returned to bed on the weekend. 

    My father was up making himself something to eat and would have been waking us up soon. 

    In answer to my query, Donald didn't say much that hot afternoon in July, standing over jour father's grave. He didn't have to. Because everything changed that day. Our relationships with our mother and brothers, Gary who was 24 at the time and still living at home for a number of complicated reasons, and David, who was five and in the process of being tested so we could find out why he didn't speak. 

    I moved away for college 19 months later and eventually relocated permanently. I often ask myself if it was selfish or for my own survival. It has not always been easy, and I often wonder what my life would be like if I had stayed in the D.C. area rather than living in this part of the South. Donald, at fourteen, had to find his own way, as his own father had at the same age. He did well. My mother was left with a severely disabled child, dependence on social security, and a house largely paid for. We did not know at the time how deep and troubling David's disability was, but it brought him and Mom to Chattanooga and I am his guardian. And Gary, who suffered from physical and mental maladies just then beginning to manifest, would plague and protest Mom and the rest of us for years. 

    I escaped to a different state, taking years and perhaps more to figure out my place in the world without a father to control or support. Donald escaped to his own identity and a fairly early but successful marriage. 

    How would my life be different if Salem Graham had not died that morning> Who, where, what would I be? I retired five months ago from a 47-year college teaching and administrative career; I have three graduate degrees and have written fifteen books. I can only conjecture on the alternative. I probably would not have moved far from Maryland. I would not have endured the heel of fundamentalism. I might have gotten the same or better education, or not. Would I have married and had my son? Would I have traveled as much? Would I have divorced, worked in government, died younger, worked overseas? 

There is no way of knowing, and these just scrape the surface of the possible questions that my father's early death--at forty-nine!--raise. I am glad I escaped the D.C. area; it lacks a reality other parts of the country have. My son never met his grandfather, but he wouldn't exist if Dad hadn't died that day. My education, friendships, marriage, career, health, adventures, everything except my faith in Christ, my health conditions, and my immediate family would be different. 

    Yes, I remember that morning. I know my brother does, too, even if we can't articulate it too. The memories are there even if language fails us, or our ability to use it does.