Words from Inside My Head

I really get it, why there’s a Tomb of the Unknown Soldier,
why bodies need to be found, brought home and buried.
People need a place where they can talk to their loved ones
when they’re gone. Back in 1966, if I had had a say, after
he died, my dad would not have been laid down,
in Arlington National Cemetery.

A couple of months after he died, my dad was put to rest
in a huge green field of identical white tombstones with
a white tombstone of his own. My mother, my sister and I
sat on neatly folding chairs and listened to a 21 gun salute.
A crisply folded flag was presented to his widow, my mother.
His mother wasn’t there.

And then he was gone, as if he had been doubly taken away,
first by his sudden death then, as any access to memories
of him seemed to have been filed away. I believe
when he said to bury him there (if he was the one
who’d made that decision) he’d thought he would die
some day in a time far away, an old man

who’d lived a full life of flying, and travel and adventure
with his children and grandchildren who would no longer
have needed his presence, but he’d died a month shy
of 41, and even in his death, I still needed him for months
and months, for years and years, I needed a spot to sit
and talk at him, to present to him

whatever problems or thoughts or worries I was having that
were caused by his dying and leaving me without a parent
who knew how to love me. 40 is younger than you think it is
when you’re 40. I think if he’d realized that, he might have
been willing to have himself buried where his children
could have more freely visited him,

but in Arlington, he became an honorable number, where
you needed to be a grown up with a map, transportation, hotel
reservations and time off to come and visit. He’d have laughed
at me if we could have talked about this over dinner –
he would have used the same logic as being picky about
your peas touching your mashed potatoes.

“It all ends up in the same place,” and he’d have told me that
“dead is dead”, that if he’d been buried in some place where
I could have more easily gone to visit a stone with his name on it,
he’d be just as dead and not there as he was now, in Arlington.
Of course, I’d have to counter by saying he didn’t know
what he was talking about because,

number one, at 40, he’d never had a parent go and die on him,
and number two, especially not at the age I’d been when he did,
and number three, I’m in my seventies and he’s only 40,
so I win. Today, if I had my way, I’d dig him up
and then bury him again, with his family,
up north, in Massachusetts.