The cemetery

October can be fickle.

It can be cold or hot. It's when the leaves burst with deep reds and yellows, and the air feels like a cool bedsheet that's been freshly washed. But it gets dark earlier, too, turning everything black before you can get to the dinner dishes.

October also boasts Halloween, and I think of the pillowcases full of candy we used to collect after multiple trips through our densely populated street of Philadelphia rowhomes. 

But for my family, October brings with it an inevitable reminder of loss.

Which brings me to the mum, the fat fall plant that offers a Crayon box of color but has to be planted  quickly before November takes its toll. My mother likes to plant them before the buds open. 

At the cemetery where three of her children lay.

Except in the dead of winter, mom will say she needs to get to their grave and plant living flowers in front of a roll call of our dead: Maria A., Patricia T., Thomas E. She often refers to these cemetery visits by saying, "Let's go see the kids": two daughters and a son, three of her six children.

We bring a shovel and a gallon of water and my mother directs the process: Dig deep. Get rid of that grass. Make sure the plant's centered.

Her voice might catch, but she doesn't cry. How she can be so faithful to the children under that stone -- and then get on with the present -- amazes me. She has her private grief, too. Yet we are far enough from my siblings' deaths that they don't hurt like an open wound, but like the scar that replaces it. We can talk about them and laugh as much as we weep. 

It is the regimen of grief.

The cemetery, an aging blanket of souls bounded by a chain-link fence and a Catholic elementary school, was supposed to be my parents' resting place. When they lost my infant sister the week before  Halloween in 1963, they purchased a plot to fit three; the three weren't supposed to include two more children, one born in October, both in their 40s when they died.

Instead, my mother will join my father at a military cemetery quite a ways from "the kids," in a suburb of Philly. It is immaculate, with stones that stand at attention like a crisp line of soldiers. But it seems sterile, almost too perfect.

Where "the kids" lay, there is the detritus of mourning: decrepit plants, plastic grave markers scattered by the wind and birthday balloons gone slack. There's the jolting bark of a nearby dog and the daily noise of children at recess who pay no mind to the dead.

The cemetery is a place that has grown on us after years of visiting with our parents from the time we were children. There have been decades of mums. 

But because the months go by faster than horses on a carousel, October eventually drifts toward winter, and in the spring, we will plant tulips, or hydrangea, or pansies. 

Dig deep. Get rid of that grass. Make sure the plant's centered.

For the kids.