what we learned about grave rubbings, teamwork, and faith . . .

If my granddaddy-from-across-the-wide-Atlantic could forgive my throwing his hat out his second-story windows when I was two, hopefully he’ll be smiling from his vantage point in the afterworld at my at times somewhat-irreverent story here of our pilgrimage to his final resting place, that also of his parents . . .

And hopefully my genealogist daughter—on this side of heaven so I’ll be hearing or reading what she thinks—will forgive me too.

It’s hard being the resident expert.  Kimberly should know!  And she was our genealogist guru as we went cemetery-traipsing throughout France in August.  Our thoughts that day were about the flowers we had forgotten to bring as tributes to those gone before us.  We were not prepared to meet our ancestors’ more basic needs or to take away with us proof, beyond that which our cameras could capture, of their final imprints on this earth.

The cemetery was not as I had remembered.  The dense hedges that shrouded the feet of my grandparents and great-grandparents were absent from my mental sketches of our other visit to their graves more than twenty years ago. I feared that time had erased even these in perpetuity tombs, that the communal ossuary might have been their fate.

My memories, marked on the Google Earth map I carried, were time-warped . . .

We found them.

A days’-dead bird was Grandmaman Yvonne’s only tribute.  We had brought her fruit from her garden, gathered snail shells from the cemetery paths, pulled garlands of morning glories . . . We were there that day, just not in our own name but to honor Yvonne in her only daughter’s name, in the name of my mother who could not bring herself to make this painful journey back in time and memory. 

In one corner of the cemetery, as in many of the cemeteries we visited, there was water.  Albrecht, my son-in-law, offered his shirt as a scrubbing rag.  We scoured the black marble until it shone, offered Yvonne our small tokens and our gratitude, gratitude for her long-ago letting-go of her only child. Three of us there that August day—Kelsey, Kimberly, and I--walk this earth because of her selfless gift . . .

Finding the other grave--the vault where Granddaddy René and his parents, Victorine and Ernest, sleep—was not as easy.  Like so many in that cemetery, a lichen-streaked granite slab, only faint etchings remaining of the names of those interred beneath . . .

in perpetuity . . .

Ernest Theodore Ollivon gave his life for his country in the opening days of World War I.  His name is the first on the plaque at the mairie, the plaque memorializing the thirty children of Crespières mort pour la France (and the one disparu) so that their homeland might remain free.

 

The metal plaque marking his grave

has withstood the ravages of time, as has, to my utter amazement, the ceramic photograph of my grandfather, the last family member entombed in that family vault.  But not so the names and dates engraved in stone . . .  Did Victorine sleep there too?  So I believed but I had never known . . .

A grave rubbing would tell us.  Kimberly knew how, of course—this was her trade, her expertise.  But we were in another world, in a borrowed car, out of our element and unprepared.  I had a notepad, lined blue paper, pages to spare . . .  Lead in the pencils I always carried . . .  Slow going . . . until . . . Albrecht remembered . . . was it from long-ago Scouts learning he said?  Leaves—green, green leaves and this was August—might work.

And they did!

What those that come after us will see in these photos, I believe, is not so much the names of the dead but the hands of the living . . .