Burial, 1999

My father is buried on top of the hill behind his house, overlooking the Napa Valley. There are two stones there now, one marking my sister’s grave, and one marking my father’s. My brother found both of the stones elsewhere on the ranch and hauled them up there in his bucket loader. They are both in their natural state, with no words carved in them. My sister died young, nearly thirty years ago now.

    My father died in August. The Neptune Society handed over his ashes in a tin box about 10 inches square, with a blue velvet cover. It takes a few days for a person to be cremated, so there was time for a few relatives to gather from, very literally, the far corners of the earth.

     My mother insisted that the burial take place at dusk. Those of us who felt hale and hearty walked up the steep hill from the house, about half a mile, long and steep enough to leave us all breathless and wobbly-kneed. The more frail drove, or were driven, up over the dry grass in jeeps. We brought a chair for my mother, who is nearly 85.

     And there we stood, about a dozen of us, watching the sun sink across the valley. Everyone agreed that my mother’s choice of time was a good one, even though we’d had misgivings. The light at that time of day fell across the valley in a manner both stunningly beautiful and fittingly sombre.

The Napa Valley runs north-to-south, with oak-studded hills rising on both sides. From my family’s ranch in the hills to the east, you can see down to Yountville to the south and nearly to Calistoga to the north, and all the St. Helena vineyards in between. In August, towards the end of the dry season, the hills are brown if cattle have grazed them, golden if not. My family has a few cows, so the hill on which we buried my father is mostly brown. The vineyards in the valley are irrigated and green.

Smitty had lured the three horses up to the hilltop with a few cuts of hay. My father had ridden his horse over miles and miles of the dirt roads that wound through those hills, and it seemed fitting that the horses should attend his burial. In the quiet we could hear them chewing, not in the least unnerved by the unusual gathering. My brother’s dog sniffed around the velvet covered box, inspected the hole, and sat down to see what would happen next.

For awhile nothing did. We stood in a sloppy semicircle flanking my mother in her chair, looking west over the waiting hole and the valley beyond. Some of us sniffled, quietly. A few people dropped things into the hole, things important either to them or to my father. My brother, a musician, dropped in a couple of tapes of his music. My brother’s girlfriend had suggested that we bury the cast aluminum ice cream scoop, which has been in the family for decades, because my father was such a devoted consumer of ice cream. My mother said he would want the ice cream scoop to be used, not put out of commission, so we didn’t.

It was a long time before anybody said anything, and it was the more distant people who spoke first. My cousin, then the neighbor who was my father’s riding companion. I don’t remember what they said. My daughter, who had been with him in the hospital when his vital signs suddenly went haywire and he died, said she was glad he didn’t have to spend much time in that hospital bed hooked up to all those tubes and wires. He was old, and not in very good health, but in fact he died following a car accident, unexpectedly. She also expressed her appreciation for his willingness to engage in dialogue and allow people to disagree with him. She will miss him. So will I. We had both engaged in a lot of dialogue with him.

I thought to myself that sudden death is definitely the way to go for the person who dies, but it’s kind of hard on the rest of us, who find it jolting and shocking. I didn’t say that out loud right then, but I’ve said it many times since.
I thought to myself that it is very slow going to get one’s head around the fact that a person who was alive is now dead, especially when death is sudden. In conversation we all were having trouble remembering to say “Bill did . . ., Bill was. . . . .” The necessity for me to say on the telephone to a dozen people a day, “My father died. . . .” had helped me to make this transition. I said it to friends and relatives, but also to perfect strangers: life insurance companies, social security agents, stockbrokers, banks, pension plans, all must be informed. I didn’t talk about that during the burial either, although I have said it many times since.

I did talk about how my father had taught me to split logs, ride a horse, play tennis, set fence posts – not that he, a city boy from Newark, New Jersey, was expert in any of these things – never questioning whether these were suitable skills for a girl to learn. I said that the best thing my father taught me was what he didn’t teach me: he didn’t teach me that a woman is a second class citizen. I said that if your father doesn’t teach you that, no amount of discrimination is going to convince you that you are.

There wasn’t anything that could be called a eulogy; no hymns were sung; no religious incantations were offered. When a long silence suggested that everyone who wanted to speak had spoken, we levered the stone over to cover the hole. Then we walked down the hill and ate a lot of ice cream.