Dear Reader:

After mother died in 2000 Ben and I were saddened to see how time had erased some of daddy’s military cross information and David’s marble slab at Forest Lawn Cemetery. It had sunk very low half under the grass…one had to dig down and push back the grass to read it.

We talked to the owner of Forest Lawn Cemetery in Laurens and expressed our concern. We were assured the slab would be dug back up and replaced on top and the more dirt filled in…but later at my aunt’s  grave site service….Ben and I had a chance to check the slabs and markers again….sadly nothing much had been done but for a brief debris removal…the markers were again becoming illegible.

David probably wouldn’t have minded…he was the most tolerant person I have ever known in my life. Because of  David’s physical disabilities (Marfan’s Syndrome Disease) he knew how it felt to be singled out, pointed at, and made fun of. Instead of these childhood experiences making him bitter, however,…he became just the opposite…the most tolerant person who befriended people living on the perimeters of society…the ones who had no voice…just hope for a better tomorrow.

I think mother understood that David’s physical disabilities would result in a potentially shortened life because she tried to give him every opportunity to see the world in his short life. Just months before he died he went on an interim Erskine trip to Spain (for school credits.) At the end of the tour he was voted Most Tolerant by his fellow student travelers.

(David is in the white sweater at the bottom of the photo)

Yes…David would be tolerant of even the sinking slab problem but not me. When one can no longer read the names on a marker in the cemetery the name of the one who has passed is lost forever…no longer a person who once walked this earth to observors.

One is still alive as long as there is one person who still remembers him or her. (One person who still loved and loves the person beneath the marker.)

I caught part of a televised documentary for Veterans Day on a man simply known as the “The Good Cemeterian.”  His real name is Andrew Lumish and he works at a carpet-cleaning company. One day while cutting through a cemetery near Tampa, Florida he noticed the terrible conditions many veterans’s tombstones and markers were in…their engraved names…literally illegible.

He began experimenting with different chemicals to clean diverse stones, clay, etc/other  materials used for markers until he became an expert at knowing what to use on what.

He felt like our veterans had given enough, their lives, and their names should be legible and honored.

“They were forgotten. I couldn’t properly thank them. I couldn’t properly understand who they were or what they were about.”

So Lumish has made it his life’s goal to scrub away that grime, and uncover the names on veterans’ headstones so visitors would see them.

“If they can’t read it at all, they can’t celebrate it, they can’t honor that person, they can’t appreciate that person,” he said. “Whereas if you properly restore the monuments, you can begin an entire conversation, and potentially — in a figurative sense — bring that person back to life.”

So one day a week, Sunday, the only day he has off, he spends it in cemeteries cleaning off veterans monuments, tombstones, and markers. He can think of no better way to spend his day off.

I want my David honored too…so I think Ben and I will be making a trip back to Forest Lawn Cemetery in the near future. I want David and daddy’s name to be seen by one and all. They both died young, too young, (David-21, Daddy-31)…but their lives were all about giving back to others who needed a helping hand.

So until tomorrow…“There are memories that time does not erase… Forever does not make loss forgettable, only bearable.”

“Today is my favorite day”  Winnie the Pooh

* At Forest Lawn Cemetery I could always use this statue to find my family’s grave. When Mandy and Walsh were little (while mother still lived in Laurens) they would start running from our family grave site to the statue yelling “Jesus” as loud as they could.

There are steps leading up to the platform….they would climb the steps and both seat themselves around Jesus’ feet… hugging the bottom of his gown/feet. A trip to the cemetery wasn’t complete without this ritual. My hope is that they never let go of holding onto Christ.