David's Burial: Saturday Sep 12 at 8:00 a.m.

The burial will be Saturday, Sep 12, at 8:00 a.m. at Westview Cemetery in Lexington, rain or shine. It will be brief. All are welcome but please feel no obligation to come. We expect a small group. We’ll meet at the cemetery. . Bishop Bement will be in charge. The U.S. Army will send two or three people; they will fold a flag and play Taps. Jim will dedicate the grave. We won’t stay for the lowering of the coffin.

 To find the spot, go to the back gate on Westview Street (if it had an address, it would be about 30 Westview Street, Lexington). Go 150 feet straight in from this gate and you will see the gravesite on the right.

            The University of Massachusetts Medical School anatomical donation paperwork said David’s body could be returned 24 months after the donation. We were caught off-guard when on Monday, Aug 31, Jim got a call saying that the research on David’s body (a pulmonary study) was complete. After a few days of adjusting to this turn of events, and a visit with our funeral home, arrangements were made.

            Yesterday we visited the cemetery and decided which grave would be David’s. At the low point of David’s stay at Walter Reed, in May 2014, Jim purchased graves. We reserved the first grave for us; David will be next to ours.

From the cemetery we will go directly to the Belmont Chapel for the Mass General blood drive. It seems fitting to have the burial and blood drive on the same day.

Semi-colon

            For the third week in August we always rent a house and invite our children (and grandchildren!) to a Summer Retreat. This year David’s funeral was on Sunday and we drove to the house in the Catskills Monday afternoon. We hadn’t done much meal planning so when we got there I made a chart of who would be at each meal. Across the top of the page I listed names: Jim, Mary, R’el, Peter, Xiomara, Matt. I was stopped cold. For 27 years the name after Matt has been David (Davey when he was young, then DJ at school and Dave at home until he settled on David). Countless times I counted children to make sure they were all with me (and even then I lost a child occasionally). Even in this stage of life, with them all grown up and on their own, I sometimes speak the list when someone asks about our family. Bishop Bement, in his funeral talk, said that death was a comma, not an exclamation point. But in that list of mine, R’el, Peter, Matt…there’s a powerful semi-colon.

            We listened to Gustav Holst’s The Planets, for our monthly Johnston Family Book Group. Near the end of “Mars”, the first planet, there is loud, dissonant chord, played nine times with rests between each, then a final crash of a chord. Musically it’s just the end of a section, with Venus, the bringer of peace, and the joyful Jupiter to come, but to me the end of the chord opens up a steep ravine and I nearly fall into it every time.