Every year about this time I visit the local cemetery hoping to find some Day of the Dead alters. Dia de los Muertos. I find the sentiments behind the tradition touching and it is a shame that it terrifies so many people who don’t understand it. 

This year as I browsed the cemetery I came across this particular site that was decorated for Halloween. It had more than one sign though, begging people not to remove items from the site. That disturbed me.  About 25 years ago at this very cemetery, there was a group of misguided youth who spent an evening destroying headstones. Today those headstones remain literally glued back together since many of them were from the late 1800s and early 1900s - and I’m guessing families either didn’t visit anymore and didn’t know the stones were broken, or if they did, they couldn’t or wouldn’t invest in a new one. Or maybe old and salvaged means more to them than new and solid. I’d be that person. 

So when I saw the sign about not removing anything I felt the familiar pang of “Who would do that? Why? I mean, I guess a psychopath might but I don’t think even they would have anything to gain from removing a flower or a trinket from a grave?”

And then I got home.  And I was suddenly poked in the heart by a rather family famous story that has been told over many a Christmas dinner. I had completely forgotten that my Uncle on my dad’s side had been brought to my grandparents door one Saturday by the police (this was in Pennsylvania where they grew up.)  He was about 12 years old. They had caught him standing at the gates of the local cemetery selling flowers to people coming in. The only problem? He had gone around to graves and collected the flowers he was selling to people - and those people of course did not know where he had gotten the flowers from.

We can laugh at this now, because he did it out of a child’s inability to understand precisely why what he was doing was so very wrong. His eye was on the candy money he was making and the job he had created for himself, not the horrifying, disrespectful looting of graves that he had done. Today he has a reputation for being one of the kindest, most helpful men in their town. I’m pretty sure nobody that knows him today would even believe this story if we told it to them. 

That’s what life did to me this weekend. It reminded me that I live in a glass house, even though I saw this room as righteous, solid brick.