A beloved husband and generous father to
his children. Loved by many and missed by all.
You paupered yourself for
this monument. For the bronze medallion declaring to all who could see I had
the faith in a God who would rescue my soul from all my failings. Why?
I never
worshiped your God. I worshiped at the altar of commerce, the church of power,
the cross of the almighty dollar. Every moment of my life was consumed with
chasing the next big investment. I built our home on falsehood and false
promises. You were clothed in fabrics paid for by the blood of broken dreams.
My children
never knew me. They never knew the sacrifices my father made to send me to
school. I repaid his sacrifice by letting him know how shameful I found him. He
spent his life plowing through the hard soil, fighting with the weather and the
blight to put food on the table and shelter over our heads. We didn’t have a
fancy house or fashionable clothes, but we were well-fed and safe and loved. He
did more to provide for his children than I ever did for mine.
What did I have left in the
end? The money was gone. I was left clutching worthless stocks and bonds to my
failing heart. I was left thinking about what I could sell to keep food on our
table. Your jewels, the house, my watch, the furniture. We could sell it all,
but which of our friends could buy it? The man at the desk next to mine through
himself through the window as soon as the news broke.
I should have spent my life
on the land like my father. With the land you know the battle. You can see the
storm clouds over the horizon. You can see the flood waters rising. We had been
warned. No one could say they didn’t see this happening.
I was
supposed to give love and life and joy to you, my wife. Instead I gave
loneliness and the mask of a world built on deception. Our home was built of
paper and our baubles created of paste. There is nothing of value there any
more than there is anything of value found under this stone.
Perhaps our
children learned from our mistakes. I know you sent our daughter to live with
your maiden aunt and our son to live with my father on his farm. Our daughter
learned the skills necessary to care for others and gained the skills you
believed were beneath an individual of her status. Cooking, cleaning, sewing,
creating a budget, all those things necessary to become a caregiver, a servant
to those more fortunate than us.
Our son, ah,
our son. He became my father’s apprentice. He gained the pride of working the
land I could never develop. Perhaps he should have been born my father’s son
instead of me. There is no shame in menial labor in him. He has found
satisfaction in turning over the rich loam and burying the seed deep in the soil.
Perhaps if they hadn’t planted me so deep I might have borne fruit like the
land my father worked so hard to keep.
Did you even
miss me? You are buried next to your second husband under some monument in a
strange churchyard. Our daughter is buried in some Western state next to her
husband. Her children place flowers on her grave and bring their children to
visit. Our son is buried next to my parents on the same land still owned by his
grandchildren. No one comes to my grave. There are no flowers bestrewing my
resting place. I should find some satisfaction knowing our children didn’t visit
your grave either, but her other children, the ones she had with him, they
bring flowers to her grave. They are buried next to her and their children
bring flowers to them.
I chased
paper and the illusion of greatness it would provide and look what it left me. No
one even remembers who I was. This monument tells the world what I was, not in
the words it says, but in the words it could never contain.
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