“Ma’am… we’re here,” the driver said as he pulled up to the cemetery entrance, snapping me back from wherever my head had gone.
I climbed out of the car, eyes on the iron gate, and looked back at him. “Please stay here… I won’t take long.” I pulled in a slow, heavy breath and walked through, the bouquet shaking in my grip.
The quiet of the cemetery pressed down on everything as I moved along the rows of stones, looking for Daniel’s plot. Something in my chest cracked open when I found it and got down on my knees, setting the flowers against the base of the marker.
“My boy… Oh, Daniel. Mom’s here… I came to be with you…” I started crying, running my unsteady fingers across the face of Daniel’s headstone. And then something stopped me cold – another grave, right there beside his.
I stared at the stone next to his and read the words carved into it, and I could not make sense of what I was seeing: “In Loving Memory of Patrice. M.”
The Stone That Shouldn’t Be There
Patrice was alive.
I’d spoken to her three weeks ago. She’d called to remind me about Daniel’s anniversary, as if I needed reminding, as if I’d been doing anything but counting down the days. We talked for maybe twelve minutes. She cried a little. I cried a lot. She said she was doing okay, all things considered. She said she’d been keeping busy.
Alive. She was alive.
I put my hand flat on the grass and pushed myself back to standing, knees aching, and I looked at the stone again. Same last initial. Patrice wasn’t a common name. I’d never met another one in my sixty-three years. The stone was granite, gray-blue, the same shade as Daniel’s. Not a coincidence you could talk yourself out of.
There was no date of death on it.
That’s what finally made my skin go cold. I’d missed it the first time, too busy trying to process the name. But the stone had her name, the “In Loving Memory” header, a small etched lily in the bottom corner. And then nothing. No date. Just a blank where the numbers should’ve been.
I stood there long enough that a groundskeeper noticed me. Young guy, maybe twenty-five, pushing a cart with rakes and a bag of mulch. He slowed when he saw my face.
“You okay?”
“This stone,” I said. “Do you know anything about it?”
He looked at it, then back at me. “The one next to the fresh plot? It was placed a few months back. Maybe six, seven months ago. I remember because it was unusual, no completion date. We don’t see that often.”
Six or seven months ago. Daniel had been dead for five months at that point.
What Patrice Told Me After the Funeral
I need to back up.
Daniel died fourteen months ago. Car accident, the kind that happens in a second and takes everything with it. He was thirty-one years old. He and Patrice had been married for four years, together for seven before that. No kids, thank God. I say that now and I mean it – I used to say it differently, used to think of it as the one sadness in their marriage, the thing they were still working toward. Now I think it was mercy.
After the funeral, Patrice and I weren’t close, exactly, but we were connected. She’d come to Sunday dinners when Daniel was alive. She’d remembered my birthday, always a card, sometimes flowers. She was a good woman. I believed that then and I believed it when I saw her name on that stone and I’m trying to keep believing it now.
About two months after Daniel died, she called me. She was moving, she said. Couldn’t stay in the apartment they’d shared, too much of him in every corner. Made sense. I told her of course, told her to take whatever time she needed, told her she was still family. She cried again. We both did.
She moved to somewhere in the suburbs, she said. She’d found a place. She’d be okay.
After that the calls got shorter. Then less frequent. By month six or seven – right around when that stone was apparently being placed in the ground beside my son – we were down to once a month, maybe. She always answered. She always asked how I was doing. Nothing ever seemed wrong.
That’s the part I keep coming back to. Nothing ever seemed wrong.
I Called Her from the Parking Lot
The driver was leaning against the car when I came back through the gate. He took one look at me and didn’t say anything, just opened the door. I sat in the back seat and stared at my phone for a minute before I called her.
Four rings. Then her voice, warm and normal: “Carol. Hi.”
“Patrice.” I didn’t know how to start it, so I just said it. “I’m at the cemetery. I’m sitting in a car outside the cemetery right now, and I just saw a gravestone with your name on it next to Daniel’s plot.”
Silence.
Not a short silence. Not the kind where someone is gathering their words. A long one, the kind that has weight to it.
“Patrice.”
“Carol, I can explain – “
“Are you sick?” The question came out before I finished thinking it. That was the first place my mind went. She was sick and she hadn’t told me and she’d already arranged everything and she was dying and she hadn’t said a word.
“No. No, I’m not sick.” Her voice was quieter now. “I’m not sick. I promise.”
“Then what is that stone doing there?”
Another pause. Shorter this time.
“I put it there,” she said. “I had it made and I placed it there myself. About seven months ago.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I wanted to be next to him,” she said. “Eventually. Whenever. I just – I needed to know there was a place for me there. Next to him. I needed that to exist.”
What Grief Does to People
I’ve thought about this a lot since that phone call. I’ve turned it over probably a thousand times in the fourteen months since Daniel died, and even more in the weeks since I found that stone.
What she did was strange. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. You don’t purchase your own burial plot and commission a headstone at thirty-four years old unless something is happening inside you that the people around you can’t see.
But I also know what grief does. I know because it’s been doing it to me for over a year. It makes you need things you can’t explain to anyone who hasn’t lost the same person. It makes you do things that look crazy from the outside and feel like survival from the inside.
She wanted to be next to him. Whenever. She needed to know there was a place.
I sat with that for a long time.
I asked her, eventually, if she was okay. Really okay, not the version she’d been giving me on the phone every few weeks.
She said no. She said she hadn’t been okay for most of the past year. She said she’d been seeing a therapist, which she hadn’t mentioned, and that the therapist knew about the stone and hadn’t told her it was a bad idea, which I found both surprising and somehow comforting.
She said she thought about Daniel every single day. She said some days she drove past the cemetery just to feel closer to him, just to know he was there.
“I know how that sounds,” she said.
I told her I drove past it too sometimes. On the way home from the grocery store, from my sister’s house, from nowhere in particular. I’d never told anyone that either.
What I Did Next
I went back through the gate.
The driver didn’t ask, just nodded when I said I needed a few more minutes. The groundskeeper was gone. The cemetery was quiet again, late afternoon light coming flat across the grass.
I stood between the two stones.
Daniel’s had a date on it. November 14th. The date I will never stop dreading every year for the rest of my life. His stone had a small cross at the top and the words “Beloved Son, Husband, Friend” and those three words had taken me two weeks to settle on because nothing felt like enough.
Patrice’s stone had no date. Just her name and the lily and the blank space where a number would go someday, not soon, God willing not for a very long time.
I set what was left of the bouquet – I’d taken half the flowers back, some instinct I didn’t plan – I set them against the base of her stone.
Then I sat down on the grass between them, which is not something I’d normally do, I’m not a sit-on-the-ground person, my knees are bad and I was wearing decent slacks. But I sat down anyway.
I don’t know how long I stayed. Long enough for the light to shift. Long enough for the cold to come up through the ground.
The Call I Made After
I called Patrice again when I got home.
I told her I’d gone back. I told her what I’d done with the flowers. She went very quiet in a different way than before, not the heavy silence but something softer.
Then I asked her if she wanted to come with me next time.
She said yes. She said she’d been wanting to ask me the same thing for months but didn’t know how.
We went together three Sundays later. Stood there, the two of us, in the cold with our coats buttoned up to our chins. She brought white tulips because those had been Daniel’s favorite, which I had not known in eleven years of knowing my son. White tulips. I filed that away somewhere permanent.
We didn’t talk much. We didn’t need to.
There were two stones and one of them had no end date and we were both still here, standing between them, which is the only thing that mattered.
She linked her arm through mine at some point and we stood like that for a while, looking at his name in the stone, and I thought about the fact that she’d made sure there would always be a place for her beside him, and I thought about how that was either the saddest thing I’d ever heard or the most devoted, and I still haven’t decided which.
Maybe it’s both.
Maybe grief doesn’t give you clean answers. Maybe you just stand in the cold with the person who loved him differently than you did, and you hold on, and you come back again next month.
The driver was waiting. He always waits.
—
If this one stayed with you, pass it to someone who might need it.
For more stories that will keep you guessing, you might appreciate My Nephew Froze Mid-Step in the Backyard and Wouldn’t Tell Me Why or even My Dad Announced He Was Leaving My Mom During My Wedding Reception, and don’t miss The Man at the Fundraiser Leaned Into That Boy’s Ear and I Couldn’t Look Away.
