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Post date: May 30, 2016 11:03:01 PM
Blog Post, May 30, 2016
Greenwood Cemetery,
Graves of Ruth Suckow (middle), Ferner Nuhn (left) and Rev. William Suckow (right)
Turner Cemetery, where my parents are buried
Greenwood Cemetery, with flowers at Mike's father's grave, from last year's Memorial Day
“The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.” Marcus Tullius Cicero
Read more at: http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/m/marcus_tullius_cicero.html
My career as a Community College professor officially ended with the end of Finals week and graduation in mid-May. Since then, I’ve been busy wrapping up: cleaning out my office, sorting through documents on my computer at work, burning CDs with photos and documents for others, and dumping documents and photos onto a flash drive. I’ve walked around campus to give people the CDs, said goodbye to a few folks, and still have a few more chores to do before turning in my keys. It was a very cathartic experience to remove my personal belongings, decide what to leave behind, and straighten the office. I have so many memories of my time as a teacher, and was struck by how much easier it was to give away books and excess office supplies than it was to delete documents and pictures.
We had some guests visiting for a week, and it was fun to focus on something on something else, like having fun, and catching up. I managed to finish up my Suckow chapter for the book about Midwestern writers ahead of the June 1st deadline. Then, they left, and I found myself making a list of projects to tackle this summer and fall: I have a bookcase and part of a closet filled with containers of family photos needing to be sorted, scanned, discarded, or placed in albums. I have a tub of old cassette tapes to be listened to, and digitized, if significant. I have another small tub of my mother’s old slides that I want to scan in and share. I have a number of notebooks filled with my mother’s correspondence, family history, and stories. All of these represent a lifetime of my mother’s work, and also remind me that I cannot keep it all—what will my own children do with this accumulation of several generations of memories someday?
Then, it was Memorial Day weekend, and I worried that the rainy weather might prevent us from visiting the family graves. Mike and I took flowers for his parents’ graves in Greenwood cemetery on Friday, and it was especially powerful, because it was the first year to decorate his mother’s grave. She is buried between her two husbands, Albert and Francis ("Red"). I remembered her joke when people asked if she would marry a third time: she had a long time boyfriend, Ted, who had walked across the battlefields of WW2 as a young man. She answered that she would not marry again, because there would be no place to bury him. However, Ted called her every day and was there at her funeral service. We then drove over to another part of Greenwood, and visited the graves of Ruth and Ferner Nuhn, and Ruth’s father, the Rev. William Suckow. As I laid flowers by their tombstones, I wondered what Ruth might think of me -- a stranger, only seven years old when she died -– maintaining a website in her honor and writing a chapter about her life and work for a book about Midwestern writers.
On Saturday, we drove to Marshalltown, and stopped at the small country cemetery near Tama, where my parents, grandparents, great grandma, aunt and uncle, and other family members are buried. It is down a gravel road, off a county highway, surrounded by a grove of ancient trees. There are several large, very lovely and pricey homes down the same road, which always strikes me as strange. The cemetery consists of 230 graves and the earliest I found dated back to 1881: a great great grandfather, Hiram Welton, is buried there. He was an early settler of Tama county, and had a good reputation as a herb doctor. As I placed flowers on my parents’ graves, I thought of all of the years that I had come here with them to decorate the graves of my grandparents, my great grandparents, and others – and listened to my mom’s stories. I wish now that I had listened more carefully!
At my father’s funeral, back in 2013, I had walked over to my great great grandfather’s grave and gestured to my children and several nephews and a niece: I told them who he was and how he was related to us, emphasizing that our family had deep roots in Tama County that went back to the Civil War era. My nephew walked over and said, “Listen to Cherie—she’s our family storyteller,” and it struck me that I had inherited more than my mother’s genealogy notes. It was now up to me to teach the next generation about our family’s heritage.
When it comes down to it, our greatest legacy is the stories--and memories--that we pass on to the next generation. I am so fortunate that my parents left me with so many of their stories, and many of them are written down. I am thankful that I had the opportunity to sit down with my mother-in-law Jane and record her story as well. It gave me a new appreciation for the hardships and struggles she experienced: they made her a stronger woman, but she suffered great losses in the death of her brother in WW2 and then her first husband’s accidental death.
Cicero said that “The life of the dead is placed in the memory of the living.” If so, it is up to all of us to honor our loved ones throughout the year—not just on Memorial day—by telling their stories, remembering the lessons they taught us, and making sure that the next generation knows their names, sees their pictures, and hears the stories too. In doing so, we not only honor their memories, but we give our children and grandchildren a greater sense of identity and understanding of their heritage.
If you are looking for information about your family, here is a wonderful resource -- findagrave.com
If you do not know where some of your relatives are buried, you can look people up by their name and you can also search an entire cemetery, and view a list of those buried there. You can also add photos and information.
Here is the entry for Turner cemetery, for example.
Turner Cemetery, rural Tama County
Last updated May 30, 2016
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