Despite the fact that I have lived more of my life away from my hometown, home is still home and the ties will forever remain. While we visited family this week, we did what has become a custom, the “cemetery tour,” paying brief respects to our loved ones no longer physically with us.

Someone commented that this is a sign of where we are in our lives, that we spend time visiting those who have passed. It didn’t ring true for me and I realized that, having lost my parents at an early age made my perspective quite different. I have found that standing at my parent’s graves, often between their two headstones with a hand on each, to be an intensely private and emotional time. I would want time just to be alone with the memories and I would tell them about all the things I wanted, needed them to know, sharing my life and my feelings with them. Despite the fact that they were, and are, often in my thoughts, being in this physical place was emotionally intense and also, somehow, grounding.

In more recent years, many of the older generation of family members have joined my parents and, in fact, some members of my own generation as well. My visits to Mom and Dad still carry a deep well of feeling but I do stop and see others for a moment of respect. Lots of memories crowd in, faces and names and stories that are mine alone and I ache a bit for all that has been, or will be, lost or forgotten.

As we walked the cemetery with family, one of my cousins and I visited our grandmother’s grave and, idly, wondered aloud where our grandfather was buried. He died years before we were born and, although many of our cousins (both of us included) carry elements of his name in ours, we knew no stories, no history, nothing to carry forward.

We decided, having an afternoon with no real plans, that we would see if we could find his burial site. And, thanks to the availability of information on the Internet, it took us little time to figure out where he was buried, at least in terms of cemetery and section.

I wondered aloud, after we had found that information, if I could find my paternal grandparents as well. I knew that my father’s father had died well before I was born and I knew that his mother had died in the year between my birth and my brother’s. Sure enough, I found both of them, at least as far as the name of the cemetery.

So, off we went on our headstone hunt, driving back across the city to the first cemetery we had visited that morning. We found the very old section where our maternal grandfather’s grave was noted to be and there we were confronted with hundreds of sites to wander and search. Within a few minutes, somehow, my cousin found the headstone, as if our grandfather were waiting for someone to stop and pay their respects!

We moved on to the other cemetery, fanning out and wandering from row to row of this large, old site. I had just reached the conclusion that this was not going to be a success and that we ought to end the search, when I found my grandfather and then my grandmother, not adjacent but a couple of rows apart.

What struck me then, and what I have thought about since, is that I had never thought about these grandparents, never wondered about them or their lives, never asked questions or heard stories. There is no one to ask now, there is no treasure trove of information. I am certain that a dedicated researcher might be able to dig out some facts but, aside from my father’s story of his family leaving Poland, I have nothing, nothing to share with my children and grandchildren, nothing to preserve.

How much easier it is for us to share and save those memories today, how many opportunities we have to ensure that there is a thread that carries forward. I say this often, in my work with older adults, that we need to ask questions and record the answers so that there is continuity for future generations. As long as we remember, the past and the present co-exist and the more that we save and hold, the richer the experience for all of us, the closer we come to filling our full hearts.