I stopped in Mt. Calm, Texas for a short while this weekend — a brief detour on the way to graduation festivities — and I didn’t realize until I turned down that old dirt road just how much I needed to.
The cemetery sits outside of town, the way cemeteries in small Texas towns tend to. Well-kept. Quiet in the way that demands something from you. I stopped at the local grocery store on the way, and they had yellow roses. I bought them without thinking too hard about it. Some nudges don’t need analysis.
I haven’t been since we laid my sweet Nanny to rest there in 2021. My grandparents’ headstone is beautiful — and on the back, it says Our Daughters, followed by all five of their names. Five daughters. Ten grandchildren. Twelve great-grandchildren. Seven great-great-grandchildren. A whole legacy carved in stone and still very much alive in all of us.
My Nanny was my person. I helped my mother care for her in her last year of life, and I miss her so damn much. I cried talking to her, kissing that headstone — and then I laughed, because I remembered the in-ground vault. The one nobody knew about. She had arranged everything after my grandfather passed and paid for it in full, decades ahead of time. She told the funeral home owner she wasn’t going to be bug food. She just never told us.
That is the most her thing she has ever done, and I love her for it.
· · ·
Many of my mother’s sisters have family plots nearby — all within ten feet or so of each other. It makes me happy knowing that someday, their earthly bodies will all be together there. The family my grandparents built so carefully, reunited on that quiet piece of land.
Their oldest daughter Mary and her daughter Tracy are just below them. Tracy and I only met a handful of times, but the relationship I had with Mary all my life — and with Tracy’s daughter in the years after she passed — always made me feel close to her. I still laugh out loud remembering some of our inside jokes. She was wild at heart, and she made life so much more interesting.
One of the fiercest women I’ve ever known, my Aunt Becky, owns the last of the family plots. A place already carved out for her, nestled between the two halves of her heart: my Uncle Allen, and her son Ben.
· · ·
Ben will always be my favorite cousin.
He was a light in our family. He had a laugh that made you stop and look around for whoever was making that beautiful noise. A mama’s boy through and through — and because his parents were divorced and his mama worked so hard, he spent a lot of time at my grandparents’ house. He was my Papa’s sidekick. He gave my Nanny endless grief, and she told the story of the time he got sprayed by a skunk at the farm like it was the funniest thing that ever happened. (It probably was.)
Most of my cousins are ten or more years older than me — my mom is the youngest — but Ben was only seven years older. Just close enough and just far enough to make him the absolute coolest person on the planet to my brother and me.
I can close my eyes and still feel the sheer joy of arriving at my grandparents’ in the summer and finding out Ben was coming. Coming to dinner. Coming to fish in the creek. Coming to the farm. Coming on the camping trip. I followed him around like a lost puppy, and he let me. Once, on a camping trip, he sprinted after my brother who had gotten swept into the current of a river — and snatched him out of the water by his coat. He was forever my hero after that. Forever.
· · ·
I’ll never forget the day he died. I’ll never forget the way my mother’s voice sounded when the words came out of her mouth, or the sick feeling that settled in my chest like something that would never fully leave. My mother and I traveled immediately — Las Cruces to Grand Prairie — and there are moments in the kitchen of the house where my mom and her sisters grew up that are burned into me. Just my mom, my Nanny, Becky, and me. Stories about Ben. Stretches of silence. The grief swallowing us whole and none of us trying to stop it.
Our cousin Jennifer — the next closest in age, Ben’s best friend for life — struggled harder than any of us cousins. I still remember how her pain impacted me. Feeling my own loss and heartbreak for her loss at the same time. She let me tag along when they found a pawn ticket for his watch, and Becky wanted it on his wrist. The shop attendant said they couldn’t have it because Jennifer’s name wasn’t on the ticket. She didn’t back down. We left with the watch.
A few years later, she gave her son his name. John Benjamin. She calls him John — because Ben is reserved. For Ben.
· · ·
I think about Ben all the time. At first the grief was so heavy I thought it would beat me. Then time eased the pain — months turned to years, and now nearly three decades have passed since I last saw him or heard his voice. But as my own son got closer to the age we lost Ben, my heart started remembering him more often. And when we laid my adopted sister’s sweet baby boy Jake to rest three years ago… the grief felt familiar. Jake, forever 19. Ben, forever 20.
I took photos of the headstones. Yellow roses, freshly laid. And I stood there and listened to his favorite Pink Floyd song — the one that still makes me think of him every time I hear it.
Wish you were here, kid. Wish you were here.
— Moe
