January 5, 2005

I received in the mail today the official guidebook + regulations for my mothers burial site.

The first thing I noticed was that in a memorandum devoted to spring flower bed laying it says;

"Please be advised that any planting must be done by cemetary staff. Unauthorized gardens will be removed."

I don't remember how much we paid for this plot of earth located on holy ground situated so far outside the city limits that my brother and I will have to lobby various family members for lifts out to visit the gravesite.

I am going to vent some spleen here so that when I call the folk over at Parves Shalom I will be able to sound like a reasonable human being.

My mother loved gardens. In the summer, when we still had the house she would spend the days out back working on her roses and drinking a beer. She had a kiddy pool filled with water and she would sit on a deck chair and soak her feet too sometimes.

When her health began to fail it was harder for her to really fix things so the garden became over-run. I remember one day before we sold the property Evan and I had to go and do a massive clean-up, and I spent a few hours wrestling a 12 foot long raspberry stalk to the ground.

The hardest thing for her about moving to an apartment complex was giving up her yards.

Her favorite flowers were roses. But her plot at Parves Shalom is in full sun so there is now way a rose bush would survive there.

It makes me furious to think that my mothers remains are somewhere so bizarre and inhumanely beaurocratic as to deny my family the opportunity to garden my mothers plot. A privalege that I think is not just our right as mourners but also something my mother would appreciate as a significant gesture of our love for her, and the spirit in which she enjoyed her life.

I will write again to give an update - any suggestions about what kind of flowers grow well in full sunlight are also appreciate. I don't want annuals, I want perrenials.

Continued from main page..