There are many beautiful markers and tombstones and flowers in the beautiful cemetery where I walk, but I am often drawn to the very loving display for Floyd and Dorthy Mears, it shows so much love, heart and imagination. From the deer at the top to the floral lettlering and cherubs, I see there are so many ways to show love and to mark love, big and beautiful memorials are one way, the Mears descendants have found another. When I see this marker, I think of love and memory.

I wonder if I will be loved and remembered in that way, I doubt it. For one thing, I plan to be cremated, for another I don’t have a lot of family or descendants to do something like that. And my love has been unpredictable, often disturbed and erratic. I imagine the Mears lives were simpler, a lot of family, a lot of family time. I suppose I am just not that loving. My biological family is scattered and out of touch with one another, I haven’t heard from my brother in years, and my daughter lives in Brooklyn and is not, I think, prone to making such an idiosyncratic display. I think I am not as sweet as the Floyd and Dorthy Mears must have been. I imagine them as warm and generous people, wonderful grandparents perhaps.

I suspect someone in the family was an avid hunter, there is a deer on the tombstone as well.

I suspect Maria will make something funky and imaginative for me and hang it in her Studio. I wish she would make it now I could see it, but she won’t, she says it is morbid and expects me to be around for a long time with my pre-owned heart. In the meantime, I love walking past this display every morning, the monument of a loving family.