Rant #4,014: Wrong

As I spoke about in yesterday's Rant, I called the cemetery office about my mother's plot not being taken care of, and the woman I spoke to said this to me:

"A mistake may have been made," relating to my mom's gravesite being totally devoid of care and full of weeds.

She said that the greenery which had been earmarked for my mother's grave might have been, instead, placed on someone else's nearby grave by mistake.

She said they would send a caretaker out to see the state of the site.

Again, this is not the world I was born into.

This is a world of complete ineptitude, one where this type of behavior seems to be accepted.

And when my sister called the cemetery, she received a com0letely different story.

Again, this is partly my family's fault, as we hadn't visited the grave to pay our respects in some time.

Again, I can make the excuse that we have been busy with so many other things, which we have, but that is not a good excuse.

We dropped the ball as much as the cemetery dropped the ball.

The only thing that is different is that the cemetery told us two different stories, neither which made much sense.

Now, we have been told that the site will be cleaned up, and bushes put where the weeds are.

So I have to say, I learned another life lesson, and I learned it the hard way:

You can't trust anyone or anything--not even a cemetery--to do the right thing.

In this bizarro world that we live in today, you have to be on top of everything, or nothing will get done.

Even to keep a gravesite in presentable fashion.

I don't even know how I feel right now.

Sure, I am upset with myself for not visiting the site and not making sure that our original wishes for greenery there were carried out.

But I am also upset with the cemetery, which should have done whatever they could to to make sure that my mother's gravesite was not a site of weeds.

So there is fault on both sides, making me kind of dizzy from the whole thing ...

Maybe even a bit numb about this episode.

Again, my father's site is fine, with nice greenery standing proudly right in front of his gravestone.

My mother's site ...

The gravestone stands out proudly, looks brand new--

But the actual grave site is nothing but a gaggle of weeds.

That is not what we intended it to look like, and whatever mistake that was made must be rectified ASAP.

The Jewish High Holy Days, beginning with Rosh Hashanah and ending with Yom Kippur, begin later this week, ironically on September 11, the evening of the 25th anniversary of one of the worst days in our nation's history.

I am not likening what happened that day to what happened to my mother's gravesite, but it all seems to be rolled into one, in sort of a strange way.

I believe that my mother deserves way better than this, and yes, I do blame myself for not going to the grave and seeing what was there, and not there, sooner.

My fault. My fault entirely.

I hope my mother, in heaven, forgives me for this obvious oversight--

And I hope that in the coming days, her gravesite will be something that looks presentable, is full of greenery, and something that she deserves for a long life well spent caring for her children and grandchildren.

She simply does not deserve this, and no matter whose fault it is--individually and/or collectively--my mother deserves much, much better.

Period.