For maybe seven seconds, sitting at the end of that table, I heard my own mother’s voice telling me in a hospital bed that they’d fight over it and that I was not to give them anything to fight about — and I realized she’d known exactly this. They’d already chosen a flat marker, the cheapest granite the funeral home carries, and they’d split the cost nine ways and called it fair, and nobody had thought to ask why I hadn’t been asked to contribute. My cousin had a folder. She’d brought it to dinner. She was going to hand it to me for a signature after dessert.
The stone had been standing since November of 2019 — cut, lettered, and set, with the plot paid through 2074. Mom got the diagnosis in August of that year and we did it together over six weeks: she picked the granite, she picked the font, she wrote her own line. She made me swear because she’d watched her sisters do this over their own mother in 1988 and she was not going to be the reason it happened again. So I paid it out over four years on a nurse’s salary and I sat through five years of remarks about the car I drive and the coat I wear and with what, exactly, and I said nothing, because I’d sworn to a dying woman that I would.
My cousin called the monument company Monday. She called me Monday afternoon, and she was crying, and the first thing she said was that the line on the stone was in Mom’s handwriting — they’d scanned it off a card. Nobody had driven out there. Six years, nine of them, and not one had been to the plot. I go twice a year. I have never once told them what it cost and I’m not going to, because that was the second half of what she asked. What I did tell my cousin, before I hung up, is the only thing I’ve ever wanted any of them to know: my mother didn’t hide it from them to protect me. She hid it because she’d already decided who she trusted with it, and she was right.
