Whenever Mémé returned to France, she paid her respects to friends and relatives both living and dead. She alone took the time to honor her parents by keeping their grave clean and in good repair, as she was fond of reminding me frequently.
Her grandparents had been buried in a place that eventually came to be surrounded by an airport. The airport bought up most of the the individual plots and moved the former occupants' remains to alternate locations without incident. However, one exemplary soul, whose daughter had died in an air raid attack during the Great War, flatly refused permission for anyone ever to move the body, for any sum. This presented a momentary awkwardness to those who considered the airport's expansion essential to the community's development. They did not wish, after all, to be seen as sacrilegeous or uncivil toward those who not only held through their ancestors' memories a sense of obligation and belonging to the land but whose framework of family identity resided with their loved ones' bones. In stark contrast to this paradigm of staunch family duty, Mémé’s brother Marcel unblinkingly sold my great-grandparents’ plot to the airport's owners for 100 francs, something less than $30 at that time.
When the remains in the overcrowded cemetery in which Papa’s mother's body lay were later scheduled to be exhumed and relocated and the family had been informed and instructed to remove any miscellaneous items from the gravesites that they might want to keep, Mémé boarded a ship at once and sailed to France to see to this business. She stayed in a hotel until Papa's sister Celine deemed it a shame, what with all the large family they had, and invited Mémé to come and share the bed in her tiny apartment. The next morning they went together to the cemetery, but Celine held back when the workers pried the stone cover away from the vault. Mémé peered inside. Nothing much remained in the tomb itself, "just a few bones and some hair," she later reported. After issuing her approval for the cross-town removal of the remaining items, she removed a ceramic photograph from the headstone and slipped it into her purse. Of all that we stand to lose, memory may be the most precious.
1967 was the year Mémé and Papa took me with them to France. They belonged at that time to a travel club that chartered monthly flights to Europe at reduced fares. The drawback to using the club was that flights could be severely delayed, as was the case with our midmorning flight out of Los Angeles that sweltering July. We waited all day and overnight for word of our plane. The next morning, feeling limp and sticky, Mémé and I brushed our teeth in the terminal lounge and sat back down to wait. Multiple inquiries at the desk revealed that the flight had not been cancelled after all, and at long last we were able to board.
Not surprisingly, upon landing in Frankfurt fourteen hours later, we arrived unmet. Papa had arranged to purchase a car, which he then intended to drive to Paris, and although the sales rep who had agreed to meet us at the airport had waited several hours, he now slumbered beside his wife in their featherbed. Wearily, we collected our luggage and sat stiffly in the plastic seats to wait for morning. When day broke and businesses began opening their doors, Papa hailed a cab to take us to the car dealership. The transaction went quickly and we soon hit the autobahn in a brand new Volkswagen beetle with tourist plates.
Now I was only 13 at the time and hadn't had responsibility for any of our belongings or travel details over the last 48 hours or so. Thus, I had been able to nap intermittently and almost as soon as we got on the road I nodded off in the back seat. My grandparents, however, had not slept a wink. This did not deter them from speeding toward French soil without the further delay that renting a room would have caused. I awoke with jolt when a suitcase fell on top of me. Papa had dozed and the car ran itself blindly into a ditch. Fortunately, no major harm resulted and we were able to get ourselves out without further incident. However, Papa decided to break his otherwise rigid no-napping-during-daylight-hours rule to refresh himself before taking off again. Mémé sat vigil.
We arrived in Levallois just before suppertime and paid our respects by staying for dinner, which lasted easily until midnight. I understood little of the conversation and cared less. Apart from marveling over my grandparents' stoicism, all I could dream of was sleep... beautiful, beautiful sleep.
Far too early the next morning, Mémé awakened me to announce that we were going to visit her parents. I thought we had come to see the sights, but no, she was hauling me out of bed to go to... a cemetery.
She had packed the necessary items and brought them with her, including gardening tools and some plastic flowers. My heart sank when I saw the gravesite. I could tell we were going to be there for awhile, and the sun already beat hotly on our heads.
As she worked, Mémé spoke of her mother, who had died a month before our arrival. I had heard this story numerous times already when she had repeated it over and over again to my mother. She'd gotten the call in the middle of the night, roused from a deep sleep to the kitchen phone, thinking it was a prank caller. They phoned sometimes to tell her that her cow was loose or to ask if they could kiss her. But this one was a distant voice asking with some urgency if she would take a collect call from the hospital of Goony. What could they have meant, 'the hospital of Goony'? She shook her head, dimly aware that the caller intended no joke. 'It's the hospital of Goony,' the caller insisted. Light dawned and darkness descended in the same instant as Mémé realized that it was the hôpital de GONESSE, the town in which her mother was living. Yes, Operator, of course she would accept the call. The notification came too late to attend her mother's funeral, which was to be held the next day. So sorry not to have phoned earlier, but it was the weekend. So sorry, thought your brother would have been in contact. 'Was she sick?' Mémé asked. No, she had died in her sleep. That at least was a blessing, as was Mémé's having thought to leave her phone number with hospital staff on a previous year's visit.
And so here we were in front of my great-grandmother's granite resting place next to her mustachioed blacksmith husband, who had lain in wait more than 30 years for his wife. I kicked at the gravel and tried not to worry my grandparents too much by wandering out of view or unintentionally showing disrespect to any of the other dead who silently rotted nearby. After awhile, Mémé arose, brushing away tiny bits of rock that had embedded themselves in the skin of her knees.
“And when I’m gone,” she demanded accusingly, “who will do it?” She glared at me. “Will you?” “No,” she said bitterly, having already answered her own question and bending to collect her tools. “I’d rather be cremated.”
