Father's Day

 Today is Father's Day and it's the first Father's Day I can't drive to the cemetery and visit my father.  I couldn't on his birthday this year or Christmas. 

I know I promised I was done writing about the storm and that this blog was genealogy full steam ahead. So this may be considered genealogy adjacent.  

My dad's ashes were left behind in Florida. I wanted to break him out and bring him with me but it would cost me about $4000. So I had to be practical. I needed every dime I had to move.  I will get him soon. I stopped to say goodbye and make sure the neighbor's flag wasn't blocking his name one last time right before I got on the road.

I know lots of people don't like cemeteries. I know people who bury their loved ones and never go back. Those people think I am strange. 

I love to visit cemeteries.  I always have.  When I was young, once or twice a year my dad, would take my nana to the cemetery to plant geraniums. She would tell me about each person we visited and I would help my dad with the planting. Sometimes I could work the old fashioned looking pump to water our freshly planted flowers.  The smell of geraniums takes me back there immediately.  

I think these trips, coupled with my desire to learn about my ancestors and my love of all places old, led to my genealogy research.  

This cemetery in Haverstraw stretches for a couple of miles. I could never walk the whole place at once.I love going to cemeteries on vacation. On the Freedom Trail my sister and I stopped and walked the small city cemetery and found the grave of Mother Goose, Sam Adams and other patriots. We did the same in Plymouth, walking the cemetery of pilgrims near our hotel.  When she lived in Quincy we would walk the big cemetery near her house and visit John Quincy Adams and his wife and then look for names of Finnish immigrants and revolutionary patriots. 

The Florida where my dad is interred is not historic. Nothing in Florida is.  He is safe there and he is in a spot right near the door, which I think he would love, monitoring the comings and goings of all the people, and just like when he was alive wishing all who enter a good morning. 

After he died in December of 2013, my dad was on the dresser in my mom's bedroom in his urn. We agreed my sister and brother would come back to Florida and we would put him in the little box in the wall in the cemetery on March 1, 2014, his 81st birthday.  I got comfortable with him there and was more than a little sad to no longer be able to say good night or know he was safe. 

I often thought about breaking my dad out. Every time there was a storm where we had to evacuate or when forecasters on the news talked about how global warming will change the Florida coast and that in 20-30 years the area, the cemetery included will be underwater.  I used to sort of joke with my mom that I wasn't going to put her in, I was going to break him out and hit the road. 

I know that many people think breaking my dad out of the cemetery is super creepy.  I certainly couldn't afford the option of moving him if he were buried. But he was cremated. I could get him here to NY.  I can't bear the thought of him down there alone with nobody visiting him and the ocean creeping closer and closer.  

This was one of the first years I didn't make a social media tribute for him for this day.  I saw some beautiful ones and considered it. I love and miss my dad so much.  I miss him every day, not just today. I feel like I could post about him every day and it wouldn't be enough.