In Memoriam

Peggy Ann Keller is no one I know.

Except I know she is underground. And I am still above ground.

Based on her gravestone, I’ve had the long life she never got.

And that’s what makes me pause at her grave every day when my dog, Buster, and I amble about the cemetery.

We go there not for exercise but to take the air. He utilizes his hound-dog nose while I enjoy the solitude and stillness cemeteries often provide.

After her birth on July 21, 1955 (a few years after me), Peggy Ann lived a full childhood into adolescence and upward to early womanhood.

Then someone laid the young lady to rest January 16, 1978, just a few months before she turned 23. 

I say “someone” because the only inscription on the marker besides name and dates is In Loving Memory.

No special notation such as Blessed Girl or Loving Daughter and Sister or Beloved Wife and Mother. Though she was only 22 she could have been someone’s wife or already some child’s mother.

Someone buried her. And lovingly remembered her.

But apparently not any more.

Artificial flowers once placed in the attached metal vase are nothing but plastic green stalks blown onto the ground, the flower portion long gone.

Clearly no one has tended Miss Keller’s grave in a very long time. And nowhere nearby are there any other graves with the name of Keller. She seemed so alone there underneath the old live oak tree.

So Buster and I took it upon ourselves to stop at her grave every day and say hello.

One morning I found a penny on our stroll. Usually I save any penny I find. But this one I placed in Miss Keller’s empty metal vase and invoked blessings from the Virgin Mary that hopefully her soul was at peace.

How was it she came to such an early demise in 1978? Thinking back, it could have been drugs. The tumultuous Sixties hadn’t entirely petered out. Maybe a car accident. Maybe a deadly illness.

Whatever it was, she died then. And I didn’t.

Standing at her grave, I gave thanks for all the years of life I’d been given. So many, many years that Miss Keller never got.

Days went by. And weeks passed. We paid our daily visits. There was always something in the air for Buster to get whiff of. Once he flushed a jackrabbit out of the crape myrtles. Many times he dug madly into a mole hole. Hawks came and went in the live oaks. The Monarch butterflies fluttered about for a few days in their annual Fall migration. Deer tracks rimmed the large mud puddle by the road. Sometimes a small flock of killdeer poked around in the grass among the graves.

Wind typically blows the artificial flowers out of many of the metal vases. They lay strewn like discarded bouquets, brittle and faded. One lay in the adjoining field where future bodies will be buried once the rest of the cemetery fills up. But for now it remains intact with native grasses and, in wildflower season, an orchestra of Engelmann daisies.

We traipsed over and claimed the bouquet. Though a bit worn, the flowers still had color and the stems were still stuck in a chunk of old Styrofoam.

I brushed off the dirt it had gathered in its windy tumbling and broke off a piece of the foam so it would fit in the vase.

With a push of my thumbs, in went the bouquet nice and secure.

In memoriam of Peggy Ann Keller.