Day in the Life of an Idiot

My family and I went to Lakewood Cemetery on Sunday. It was a beautiful day, even if the wind was cold. We went to clean off Ella*'s grave and to enjoy the cemetery. It might seem a little weird, but when Shawn and I live in Uptown, Lakewood was a favorite place to stroll. This time when we were there, we saw two moms pushing their strollers through the cemetery. It really is like a park, especially since it has an actual lake in the center of it.

And there are geese:



Shawn had brought along flowers to leave at Ella's grave. We had purchased a built-in vase, but it'd been quite a while since we'd last visited and it took some wedging and struggling to get it up out of the ground. It's hard to describe, but it's a self-contained thing, where there's a vase inside a metal sleeve that sits in upside down, until you twist it out and put it upright. The interior had gotten filled with quite a bit of dirt, but with the application of water I was able to loosen it enough to get it out. (There's a built in drainage hole, but that had also gotten a bit plugged with roots.) At any rate, that was quite the ordeal. We did get it working, though, so that's what's important.

We tend to think of Ella now, rather than on August 5, her death day, because she was conceived on Halloween. We know this for a fact, of course, because we did the artificial insemination at a clinic. (Not as much guess work that way!) We don't visit the grave annually, but every so often we get the urge.

Mason is never quite sure what to think about his sister that he never knew, I don't think, but we've always been upfront about who she was. Still, I know it's a bit weird for him to see his parents sad, and not have any sense of Ella. He mostly kept his distance, though he helped with the cleaning of the vase. Then, he and I wandered around looking at all the amazing graves. We played a little "game" of trying to find the earliest birth year on any of the headstones. We found someone born in 1773!

There's also just a ton of amazing stone work.



It was a lovely, contemplative time.

Of course, every time we go to Lakewood, we end up driving past our old duplex on Girard, and we have to remark on how much Uptown has changed in our absence. (A LOT!)

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For any newcomers to my blog, Ella is my daughter. She was stillborn about 15 years ago (August 5, 2002). I have a bit of a memory page still up for her on my website, though it needs updating as, obviously, we did continue to try and now have Mason.