As many of you will recall, I lost a younger brother in December 2020 to a heart attack, and Mom passed away last April. We had decided to intern both of their ashes at my father's gravesite where I grew up north of Indianapolis. Dad died in 1981, and it has always bothered me that we had all moved away and he was there alone. So I redesigned the headstone to include my Mom and a reference to my brother. Even late in COVID it took months for the granite to come in, but the monument guy did fantastic work and was very reasonable. We finally found a weekend that would work for my other brother and sister, and it was last weekend over Labor Day.
We had about 20 people attend, friends we grew up with and some I had not seen for 3 decades. It was a nice ceremony.
Of course, apparently I always have to add some comic relief even to situations like this. When we were done my brother and I went to lower the vault into the grave, where they had dug a hole about 2-ft by 2-ft by 3 ft deep. Well, we couldn't drop it, so got down to lower it in as gently as possible. I put my left hand on the edge of the hole to stabilize myself, and as we were lowering the vault... the edge gave way. I darn near went head-first into the hole. Fortunately a friend of mine grabbed my collar to prevent me from going all the way in! Well, my brother immediately says "if you had fallen in I would have asked them to bury you and we could have got a 4 for 1!". That's my brother for you!
We retreated to a local establishment for some drinks and to catch up (it was hotter in IN than in SC that weekend!). It was so nice to catch up. The one thing I noticed when I was up there, unrelated to my visit's purpose, was how nice everyone was. In every place we went. I forgot that about IN.
