My family has a thing with cemeteries. It baffles me. My relationship with burial grounds has been limited to the shortcut to my hometown’s train station and moody strolls as a teenage goth. Other than writing a few poems in a notebook, listening to Depeche Mode, and moping around, my time spent within their gates (fortunately) has totaled less than the number of hours I’ve spent de-icing my freezer. My family, on the other hand, visits them regularly.

I’ll squelch the image that holidays with my kin are like a Munsters reunion by saying that they go with flowers. Their trips aren’t nearly as self-indulgent or covered in eyeliner as my high-school meanderings, my relatives simply go and pay their respects to friends and loved ones. They do it often, not only on holidays or anniversaries. This has always seemed peculiar to me, but it’s never been something that I’ve had to confront directly. Well, except for the one time my cousins and I visited my grandmother’s grave on Thanksgiving and I kept waiting for a bloody hand to rise up out of the dirt.

I’ve never understood mourning traditions, and this perplexity only grew when my mother’s mother passed away. The way I saw it, grandma died. She was coated in three-inches of makeup and buried on an afternoon in early September, 2002. That was that. Going and leaving flowers months later, while a completely respectable idea, never appealed to me. It just felt like driving fifteen minutes to endure a stretch of awkward silence. So, much my to my mother’s chagrin, I confined my grieving to fits of tears and muttered conversations with my grandmother’s spirit, which usually just looked like me talking to myself in the car en route to work. While possibly not the most productive way to cope, it didn’t feel like a waste of carnations. And I figured that if grandma was looking down on me from some puffy white cloud in the ether, she’d probably want to give me a stern talking-to anyway. Best to avoid hanging out where her body was buried, lest she rise up and criticize some of my lifestyle choices.

Over this past year, I’ve visited my mom’s gravesite once, and I practically had to be kidnapped to do it. My uncle and I left some flowers, said a prayer, I burst into tears, and we left. It seemed like a really unnecessary way to ruin a perfectly decent afternoon. I didn’t want to go back to that place. At least the last time I was there my mom had been above ground in some sense, still laying in her Pepto Bismol colored coffin, with everyone who loved her around. Within a few months, it had just become another cold spot of hard soil, now with a few browning spider mums on top of it.

I looked around. There were gravestones with plastic poinsettias, faded in the sun. A few had wreaths with garishly bright ribbons. One or two, presumably fallen soldiers, had wooden crosses with poppies in the center. A handful had stones perched on top of them, honoring a Jewish tradition that represents permanence. Many had flowers in various stages of decay. It all seemed so depressing. I didn’t want to leave anything for my mother’s body. I wanted to continue to talk to her when I was alone, cry when I saw her picture, and call her family on Sundays. More importantly, I wanted to forget the fact that the hands that brushed my hair and ironed my shirts for twenty-eight years were six feet under a clot of dirt in Westbury, New York. The brutal reality of this whole mortal coil thing is something that her death forced me to face, and then run from. The past year has been filled with a lot of existential pondering and "crises of faith," and no fucking $12 bouquet of flowers is going to make me feel better. Roses or dahlias, they certainly won’t change my mom’s situation. After all, if any part of us lives on in death, I can guarantee that she would feel completely pissed off that she couldn’t tidy up once the flowers passed their prime and the leaves started piling up around her tombstone.

I figure that after a year I can’t cite missing my mom as a justifiable reason for staring into space or getting teary when I hear Hall & Oates. I’ve tried to maintain such an aura of stoicism and impenetrable rationale while shuffling through the funeral, sale of her house, and the bevy of legal issues that come once a person gives up the ghost. It’s anger at my own sorrow that makes me squirm when presented with the idea of visiting her grave. Why should I pretend that I’ll only feel sad there, performing some sort of misunderstood ritual by tossing a corner market arrangement by a rock etched with her name? I don’t want to have to acknowledge the fact that this sadness has been an unspoken presence in my life since the moment of her diagnosis. It trails me like a shadow. It’s not as if I can just summon appropriate grief within the wrought iron gates of a cemetery. If the ritual is supposed to work tandem with emotion, then I should have been laying flowers at every Italian bistro, pet shop, or art gallery in this city. Those are the places where I feel the loss of my mother as sharply as I do when I look at her photograph, and more profoundly than I could at a burial ground. I still don’t understand the notion of flowers.

Archaeologists in Scotland found a bunch of perennials at a gravesite dating back 4,000 years. And while the majority of bouquets I’ve seen in cemeteries look like they’re that old, it can be assumed that leaving flowers is imbued with a sort of antiquated ceremony. I’ve never been able to think of something I’d feel comfortable leaving behind. A card would be stupid. No one would read what I wrote, except for a curious groundskeeper or an unusually literate squirrel. Stuffed toys are already creepy enough, leave them exposed to the elements for a few weeks and I guarantee that, if I were the occupant of that grave, there would be a complaining zombie carrying it to the trash. The stones that are a part of the Jewish tradition are beautiful, but my mother was Catholic, and my Jewish father has already told me he’s being cremated and left by the beach. Some people place pennies on gravestones, which is an observance that dates back to Benjamin Franklin’s time. It’s said to bring luck, or to echo the sentence emblazoned on the back, "In God We Trust." This makes a little more sense to me, since coins have been associated with death throughout history, most notably with silver being put over the eyes of the deceased to pay the underworld’s ferryman of Greek lore. I could leave my mother some of my pocket change and believe that it will give me good fortune. But this seems more superstitious than solemn.

Honoring a person’s memory can be as simple as yammering to their imaginary ghost in your kitchen, as I do, or it can be elaborate, like dedicating a mass or leaving an ornate wreath on a grave marker. I can’t judge how other people preserve their memories, even if I don’t get it. It was only about a week ago that I started to understand in my own way.

I knew that the anniversary of my mom’s death was coming up, and I figured I’d have one of the occasional basket-case days I’ve had over the past twelve months, the kind where I lay on the couch listening to The Cure’s "The Figurehead" on repeat in the dark. But instead I had the urge to visit my mom’s grave. Another reason why this is extra weird to me is because I dedicated a shelf in my closet as a little altar to her and our other dead relatives. I mean, I have a convenient place to go if I want to cry and light a candle and feel sad. But this time I want to get dressed and take the train out east, flowers in hand, in order to commemorate the day. While this is a really strange impulse, sort of like I decided to eat an entire jar of pickles or watch a hockey game from start to finish, I respect it. I’m going to go with my uncle and stand there in that uncomfortable quiet. Although I can’t guarantee it, I’m pretty sure I’ll be waiting for a hand to rise up out of the dirt.