Have a seat

            The visits to the cemetery are never “Yay!” moments in our lives, but they have a certain routine.  Usually, Christina goes by herself.  If she gets the rest of us to come along, she has a series of jobs for Emma and Noah – changing the batteries in the lanterns, putting out food in the bird feeder, etc – while I keep Murphy under control and try to keep myself composed.

            Last week’s visit was not routine. 

Christina and Emma got to the grave a few beats ahead of me and Noah and, when we got there, they told us that Colin’s bench was missing.  I mean, I probably would have figured that out on my own eventually, what with no place to sit, but it was important information that they wanted to share right away.

            Sigh. 

            I mean, I just don’t get people.  At this point, we’ve had the following removed from the grave site:

• the glass bauble
• a watering can
• and now the bench

            I guess we could also include the plants that were removed by the freelance gravesite gardener, though that does seem to fall into a different category.  But the larger point is: Which percentage of people were raised so improperly that they think it’s OK to mess with a grave? 

            I asked around.  A friend told me that a family grave often has stuff removed from it.  The relatives of the deceased will leave chocolates on the grave, still in the packaging.  I guess that is tempting fate a little bit.  Also, if you’re so desperate that you can’t afford 3 or 4 bucks for pretty generic chocolate, then maybe you have bigger problems than your grave thieving ways.  But still.

            I mentioned it in my men’s group on Friday.  Everyone instantly went “Oh yeah.”  Even if it hadn’t happened to them, they’d heard of other cases involving people they knew.  One of the Dads, whose dead child stories scarily parallels Colin’s in terms of the year of the diagnosis, the kind of cancer, the brief period of convalescence and even the location where they got radiation therapy, also reported a stolen watering can.  Like all of our lives just keep moving in the same cycles even after our children are dead.

            I just…  I mean, I have strange thoughts some times.  But it has never occurred to me to run by a graveyard and see what I can pick up, either in terms of home decorating or snacks.  It makes me think people are worse than they actually are.

            Christina took it in stride, though I think she was secretly plotting someone’s death as she went about tending the grave.  She sent me and the kids out on search parties, but we all came back empty.  Conspiracy theories started up.  I figured the people in Hippie Hollow* must have taken it.  Noah went full Encyclopedia Brown as he began developing theories about how they would have gotten the bench out of the place.

            After a few minutes of this, it dawned on me that my kids are ridiculously bad at finding things.  Like, if you ask them to pick up something that’s right in front of them, they’ll tell you half the time they have no idea how to find it.  So, I went off with Noah and Murphy and cased their part of the joint anew.  I saw two or three benches that looked promising, but none of them had the marker we had placed on the bottom of the bench.  And then, just as I was about to give up, I decided to try one more bench, even though Noah insisted that one didn’t look at all like Colin’s bench.

            Except it was. 

It was probably 50-80 meters away from Colin’s grave.  Christina’s theory makes the most sense to me: There was probably some kind of gathering at a grave with lots of older people, so they pulled together a variety of benches for seating and then, when it was over, either didn’t care or couldn’t remember where the bench came from.  Maybe they thought it was a bench that belonged to the cemetery.  It is still a mystery to me, because there were at least two or three benches closer to the site where we found it, any of which could have been picked up with less carrying time.

            I guess it doesn’t matter.  I think the main lesson is not to take things from graves.

            We carried it back.  I’m amazed how the mood lightened.  It was the first time I can remember talking out loud to Colin at his grave (I speak inside my head all the time), admonishing him for not taking care of his stuff and then telling him he had my permission to go and haunt the bench thieves.  I don’t think I’ve joked with Colin once since his death.  I mean, there aren’t a lot of opportunities like that with your dead child.

            We’re probably going to chain it to the closest tree, which is unsightly, but might give us some peace of mind.  We’ll probably also put a second, more visible, marker on it explaining that this bench belongs to this grave.  I’m also toying with the idea of putting a GPS tracker on it, but one or two people have suggested that I might be overreacting.  We’ll see.

            As always, I just understand so little.

* Hippie Hollow (not its real name) is a settlement in the woods behind our neighborhood and is only a stone’s throw from the cemetery, which is also in the middle of the woods.  I thought for ages that Hippie Hollow was a squat of people refusing to be bound by society’s rules, but Christina told me last year that the tenants actually have to get permits and licenses to live there, which makes them seem a lot less rugged and independent in my eyes.

Anyways, it’s a big fenced compound (though the gate is always wide open), subdivided into a lot of smaller lots where people have set up some pretty primitive structures.  A couple look like they might be made of the kind of flimsy wood you use in theater sets.  Some have campers.  Other homes look pretty improvised.  The people I’ve seen coming and going don’t look any more or less counterculture than other people I see roaming around Berlin.  Basically, it’s just a hodge-podge of weird structures in the woods. 

I thought hard about how to describe it.  In the end, I truly think that, if you stumbled across it unprepared, your first thought would be “Who put the set from Duran Duran’s ‘Wild Boys’ video in the middle of a German forest?”