Marks The Spot

The third week of August, about a month after my dad died, my mom and I went to the funeral home to order the marker for his grave. The funeral director had several large books filled with polished granite headstones, most engraved with scriptures or flowers or snippets of poetry. In short, they looked like the markers below which most of the members of my father's new community rest.

None were right for my dad.

We had this image in our heads of a very natural looking stone, something unpolished, fresh from the earth. There was nothing like that in the catalogs we were flipping through, and the funeral director couldn't remember seeing anything like it, either. He called the man who does the engraving who said, I imagine with a shrug of the shoulders, "I'll engrave whatever they want. Have them go to a quarry to pick out something."

We left the mortuary and went directly to a rock quarry in Estacada, just off the highway on the way to Mt. Hood. The owners seemed surprised by our quest but told us to wander around and let them know if we found anything. Rocks were piled into small hills, and we looked for an hour until we found one on the bottom of a pile, a stone just thick enough to be buried, just wide enough to be engraved, just beautiful enough to declare that underneath lies a man who was well loved. The quarry workers helped load it into the trunk of my mother's car, charged us a whopping seventeen dollars, and we were on our way. (Nothing in the catalog we were given was under five hundred.)

We left the stone at the mortuary with a promise that the stone would be engraved and placed by the beginning of September. For reasons we don't fully know (the funeral home blames the mason, the mason blames the cemetery, the cemetery blames the funeral home), the stone wasn't placed until last week. But it was worth the wait. I am amazed at the human psyche: not having to visit an unmarked grave makes my father's passing somehow more bearable. It's that whole feeling of wanting the world to stop and take notice, to scream to the hills that something monumental and important has been taken from us.