Z and her grandmother decided to initiate a family Day of the Dead celebration this year. They prepared for this by setting up an altar for a couple of family members who had died, as well as taking a couple of trips to the local cemetery where many of Jenni's Czech ancestors, including Z's great-grandfather, Marcel Konecny, are interred.

Z knew Marcel as an oblivious toddler but has no memory of him now. On their pre-Day of the Dead cemetery visit, Z and her grandmother collected plastic flowers from every garbage can in the cemetery and decorated Marcel's grave with them. Since these were probably in the trash cans thanks to the groundskeepers, it should not surprise anyone to learn that this gorgeous display had been stripped from our own family's graves by the time we arrived at the cemetery on Sunday for our graveside picnic. They had been replaced by a single PVC pipe stuck in the ground as a helpful aid.


The family I married into has a sincerely felt if somewhat irreverent manner of attending to the memories of their dearly departed. Marcel was a tempestuous patriarch about whom a few chestnuts are routinely shared, channeling much of his legendary vigor in the process. When he died in 2005, an "extra" headstone was supplied by the U.S. military to commemorate Marcel's service in World War II, and was placed a few feet from his actual grave; the unintended consequence of this honor is that the living have not yet decided that having his date of death noted on his actual headstone is worth the engraving expense. It isn't hard to envision local residents of the year 2030 hoping for a fleeting glimpse of the world's oldest man.

Yet this is a family that chooses to spend the day after Halloween picnicking at the family plot, drinking moscato spumanti toasts in his honor, and explaining to a five-year-old why she shouldn't treat granite headstones as playground equipment.


Sometimes being remembered requires a little tolerance.


It beats being forgotten, doesn't it?