TheBanyanTree: Doing Lunch with a Dead Person

[Margaret R. Kramer]

7/10/97
Hi honey;
Well!  It seems that you and I are alike in more than one way.  I write to
you saying I had tears and you write the same thing.  You kept all my
letters and I kept yours.  I love you and you love me!  We are so alike in
many ways, too bad about the age difference between us.  But love is being
with a person and having great feelings for that person. 

LOVE YOU LOVE YOU LOVE YOU LOVE YOU
OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO
Ray


A week or so ago, I decided to open up Ray’s tub and dig out some of the
emails sent between us that he had filed away.  I haven’t really looked in
that tub, other than throwing in a few things in it once in a while, for
more than a year.

I was careful to open up the tub when it was daylight and when Asher and the
boys were home.  I didn’t want to open it when it was dark and I was alone,
because then I’d start looking for Ray around the house like I sometimes do.


It’s stowed in a storage area in our bedroom tucked under the eaves of the
house.  I dragged it out, and then opened the lid.

It was like Ray’s spirit came flying out.  I lost my breath for a moment,
then I caught myself, and was able to cry for a while as my eyes wandered
over all the things in the tub.  There is clothing, books, notebooks, and
other things.  All precious mementos that represented Ray.  I wish I could
take their magic and just for a few moments use it to bring Ray back again.

Finally, I reached in and grabbed a stack of printed emails and chats.  And
I began to read and remember.

A few days after that, Quincy found some papers stuff under the couch.
Thank goodness, he didn’t look at them, but handed them to his dad who
handed them to me.

Ray LOVED porn.  He wasn’t secretive about it, but he didn’t flaunt it
either.  As far as I could tell, his looking at naked women’s pictures
seemed to be in the normal range.  He spent more time online playing poker,
I think, than looking at porn.  

I threw out the porn videos he brought with him from Milwaukee after he
died.  I think he watched them once in a while, and a couple of times we
watched them together.  I tried not to throw up.  I’ve never been able to
get into watching porn.  To me, watching porn is kind of like watching a dog
get run over by a car.  It’s more disgusting to me than erotic.

When I was going through his things to get his office ready to turn into my
grandsons’ bedroom, I found a box full of printed graphic and erotic stories
under his desk, which I also threw out.  What else would I do with them?  I
don’t read graphic stuff either.

I’m kind of pitiful, aren’t I? 

And that’s what Quincy found under the couch.  An erotic story, a few
pictures of naked women, and a couple more erotic stories printed over a
period of several days in 2007.  I smiled when Asher handed  the pile of
paper over to me.  That was so Ray.

I’m keeping this last stash of porn and in the tub it will go.

I can’t help but think that Ray wanted me to find this stash, because when I
was re-reading our email correspondence, good gracious, we were extremely
graphic in our writing.  We were our own erotic writers.  

I’m sure Ray forgot, as well as I, that we were so into each other sexually,
that we wrote about it constantly after we met.  He could have pulled out
some of our correspondence from the file cabinet and skipped printing out
the erotic stories.

I was thinking about Ray so much this past week, that on Thursday, while
driving to work, I realized it was an absolutely beautiful day, and decided
to act on something I thought about earlier this summer, and that was to
have lunch with Ray.

So, at lunch time, I drove out to the cemetery, I cried as I drove along the
road to Ray’s grave.  We never had lunch together when I was at work.  So
this was a break in tradition.

When I got to his section, I got my lunch and the newspaper, and pulled out
a lawn chair from the trunk.  I walked over to his grave and settled in and
after crying for a little bit, began eating my lunch and reading the paper.

A woman, probably about my age, walked up Ray’s section, and went to the
back.  She was dressed in scrubs, and I bet she was sneaking in a moment
with her husband, too, on her lunch break.

I saw an older couple pull up and then walk into a section across the road
from me.  He was carrying a lawn chair and she was walking next to him.

I went back to my paper and finished my lunch.  Ray and I were together for
a while in that not so quiet place.  The cemetery is close to the airport,
so the planes are taking off all the time, and the car noises from the
nearby freeways are always humming in the background.

But within the boundaries of Fort Snelling National Cemetery, it is always
quiet, and in that quiet, I can talk to Ray, just like we did when he was
alive.

I finished my lunch, so I gathered everything up, and gave the tombstone one
last kiss.  

As I walked back to my car, I saw the older woman sitting in the lawn chair
in front of a grave.  Her husband was standing and waiting under the shade
of a nearby tree.  I would bet money she was visiting her son.

And we’re compelled to be near them.  To feel their love and give them ours.
Now I can understand why people take their lawn chairs and spend a day at
the cemetery with their loved ones.  Some ancient thought process in my
brain guides me to Ray.  That’s the only way I can explain something that
seems so strange to do become so normal and ordinary.
         
Well, we’re finally getting some rain.  We had MASSIVE thunderstorms last
night, with intense lightning and thunder.  And best of all, when I checked
the rain gauge this morning, we had two inches or rain.  The grass is
getting long and green and the trees look a little less stressed.

We’re getting some heat today, too, after practically freezing all summer.
It’s going to get steamy and hot, just like summer should be.

Margaret R. Kramer
margaretkramer at comcast.net
margaret.kramer at polarispublications.com
www.polarispublications.com

True silence is the rest of the mind; it is to the spirit what sleep is to
the body, nourishment and refreshment. 
-William Penn