We call them memorial parks or final resting places; cemeteries or burial grounds. Where the remains of the deceased are buried, I see only graveyards; that is, yards and yards of graves.
The idea of boxes containing remains buried underground has never appealed to me. I recognize, however, that the ritual has meaning to many people, including my mother and father. Cemeteries are designed for the living, both for those who soon expect to be buried and their families. Landscaping would seem to be an important feature, along with easy access. You might choose a family plot, an established place with ties to the community.
Or you might do what my deeply missed and deeply stubborn parents did.
Mom and Dad bought an apartment in Longboat Key, north of Sarasota, in the early nineteen nineties. It made sense. They were retired from duel careers: my father as an attorney and a small business owner, my mother as a co-owner of the business and its chief marketing person. Their long-time business partner, my dad’s brother, was dead. After years of living in Milwaukee and enduring the harsh Wisconsin winters, they were ready for sunshine.
Sarasota provided what my parents needed: warm weather with just enough variety to interest my mother, a laid-back Gulf Coast ambiance, a lively cultural scene, and a diversity of communities. My parents always identified as Jewish but they never wanted to find themselves in an exclusively Jewish community. In Sarasota, they joined the synagogue but religion was simply one marker, along with “golfer” or “artist” they used to pick their activities and their friends.
We were nevertheless surprised, my siblings and I, when they became permanent residents of Florida. My parents were deeply rooted in Milwaukee, my father in particular. Just a few years earlier, he’d declared he could never imagine voting in the Sunshine State. Perhaps being a snowbird took its toll as they aged. I know the winters up north were difficult for my mother. Still, I never imagined they’d forsake their Midwest identities to become full-time Floridians.
It’s supposed to be instructive to watch how your parents age in place, what decisions they make, what regrets they retain. We then promise ourselves never to do what they did, unless we choose to do exactly what they did.
The apartment my parents bought featured breathtaking views; in every other respect it was severely isolated. Longboat Key is a slip of land with a single road traveling between Sarasota Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. Their gated development offered a swimming pool and tennis courts; everything else was driving distance away. Billed as an “active senior” community, it was no place to be old or ill—or both. The place presented like a ghost town in summer. My folks made it work as long as they could, which is to say, as long as they could drive. After that, their small apartment with the big views began to feel like a lovely prison. They missed their old lives.
Go back to Milwaukee, I urged my father, even if for a few months to reestablish yourself. We’ll get you up there, I promised, and we’ll get Mom up there too. I meant we would accompany them back but I also reminded him they had a home of sorts: side by side plots in their family’s area of the Jewish cemetery.
Instead, my father dug in, stubborn about his life choices or perhaps his waning control over them. He announced he and my mother had sold their plots in Milwaukee and bought them in Sarasota, where he now lived, as he reminded me. The place they chose is certainly ecumenical. It’s also vast. A dozen Catholic and Protestant churches are represented. Sarasota’s two synagogues are also included, each with tiny areas, measured in yards and situated at the edge of the park like afterthoughts. Navigating the cemetery requires both a car and a map, which you pick up from a “care concierge” at the funeral home/care center. The memorial park, as it’s called, sits at the intersection of two busy arteries on Sarasota’s western edge. It’s close to Highway 75 and about as far away from Longboat Key and the water my parents loved as you can get and still stay in the county. Aside from a few mature trees in the center, its landscaping is minimal.
Maybe it’s the only game in town. That doesn’t make it any less depressing.
Five people attended my father’s funeral, including the nurse accompanying my mother. At her funeral ten months later, there were three of us. Seven years later, I finally made it back down to Sarasota, jumped off the highway at exit 210, stopped at the center for a map, got lost, found the designated area and still had to pace the site until I spotted the plaques in the ground. At last I stood in front of their nameplates and presumably on top of their graves, which was the only way to read them. I’d planned on some sort of semi-sentimental soliloquy. Instead, I looked at the scruffy grounds, the scratched bronze of my father’s nameplate, the adjacent names on adjacent markers, none of which I recognized and said aloud:
“What were you thinking?”
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