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Talking to my friends and family, I get the sense that it isn’t standard to mentally tie thoughts to location the way that I do. When I return to a location after ten minutes or two years, I snap back to the last thing I was thinking when I was in that place. If you have ever gone shopping with me, you’ll notice that I am a terrible conversationalist: every time we go to a store we’ve been to before, I will subconsciously force the conversation into the last thing we talked about in that place.

I partly blame my current condition on this phenomenon. Since coming home, I’ve returned to a state of grieving my grandmothers and my uncle. Even little things make me cry lately, and I hate feeling so unstable.

So you might understand that I was averse to my mom’s idea of visiting my grandmother and uncle’s graves on a day that was supposed to be about family bonding. Having lost both in the winter of 2003, my mom’s family is finally starting to heal and move forward, and I really didn’t want the emotional setback I was sure would be associated with the visit. I’m all about the Irish wake style of mourning: why can’t we just have a beer and talk about happy memories? This was the precise reason I was such a big fan of cremation; when you ask to be cremated, you can protect your loved ones from the depressionfests associated with visiting your burial site. You exist only in memories, where you should be. So in summary I hated the idea, but fortunately, I didn’t really have much say in the decision.

We stopped first at my grandma’s plot and decorated the site with a homemade wreath, evergreen clippings tied with tartan ribbon. We cleaned the headstone and made sure it looked like a place that hasn’t been forgotten.

Uncle Jim’s site is always harder, since he died young and there’s no way to sugar-coat the fact that he was cheated. My uncle discovered his melanoma too late, and I was away in college while he battled it. By the time I came home for Christmas, the writing was on the wall, but I couldn’t understand that. I’d heard about chemo and experimental procedures and hospitals between Michigan and Tennessee, but he’d always lived a life not very accessible to a kid, and it was no different being older. He never got married, never hosted our family events. Back then, I didn’t know what his house looked like. He was the magical figure who showed up with extravagant and impractical gifts…huge bouquets of balloons on my birthday, a Nintendo the year that all my brother and I knew about Nintendos was that they were for rich kids. He wasn’t a person who had problems. He didn’t know words like “bedtime” or “enough.” He was immune to all the laws of the adult world as far as the ten year old me could tell, and the twenty year old me wasn’t so different.

And so on my first day home, unarmed with counterquestions about his life, I let him draw me out, talking all about mine. And that was embarrassing because that was one of that last real conversations he ever had, and it was just all my bullshit that, miraculously, he cared about despite the realities surrounding him. I haven’t ever really experienced any feeling crappier than mourning the death of someone who brought so much to your life, without any reassuring thoughts that you brought much to theirs.

My mom says that one nice thing about graveyards is that you can visit the site and it makes you feel a little less guilty for all the things you should have done when it mattered more. So for the third year running, we stumbled through this frozen tundra of a graveyard to put the other homemade wreath on my uncle’s plot. In the moments prior to finding the site, I would have told anyone who cared that this was a miserable ritual. Nobody goes to a graveyard to think about how lucky they were to have the deceased in their lives. They go to be miserable, and it was working like a charm.

But I was in for a surprise because as it turns out, bringing our wreath to my uncle’s gravesite was akin to bringing a twig to a bonfire. The headstone was already adorned with the hugest wreath in my field of vision; a big, beautiful thing decorated with plastic deer, clearly a gift from his lifelong hunting buddy, Dave. Three years after his death, it was clear that the people standing at that site were not the only ones hurting. It was only through my tear-blurred vision that I noticed that despite the impeccable groundskeeping at this graveyard, most of the plots had been decorated this holiday. Someone had left a Jaegermeister cap on the next plot, and looking at the rows and rows of plots decorated by mourning people, the world seemed a whole lot more connected. I always thought it was a little morbid that my dad finds peace in graveyards, but I think I understand that better now. And I might have changed my mind about cremation.

On the way out, I noticed a row of headstones for a family killed on Independence Day of 2000. The youngest was eleven. I don’t know the details of that tragedy but with another holiday famous for drunk driving coming up, I hope you all find ways to stay safe.