Marking Your Son's Grave Part 1

so yesterday gear and i went to Advent Bronze & Granite to pick out a grave marker for kyle.

due to the rules at Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills, the marker must be bronze and must be a certain dimension. and we need to save half of it for me, because we don't get individual markers since we have a double decker grave. side by side graves--you get side by side markers. so there is not a lot of space on the marker for what you want to say about someone for ever.

so i find myself sitting in this tiny office in a tiny converted house waiting for gearey and i'm looking at the samples of the bronze markers and different textures and colors we can choose and these are the ugliest things i have ever seen. talk about literal monuments to bad taste! it's like greeting card standard. there are markers in armenian and in spanish and in english, but they are all ugly. like equal opportunity ugly. and all choices have ugly borders. and some have florid or bulky type face, mostly all have some religious symbols, of course.

and there are the ugliest bronze castings of faces; you know these people must be somersaulting in their graves. one bronze has the face of an old man wearing glasses which captures and emphasizes the distortion made by the thick glass of his glasses. you know how you can look at someone through their glasses and their eyeballs seem tinier? well this guy looks horrible. couldn't they have made the rendition without his glasses? or at least without the distortion?

i'm looking at the few choices and become aware that the bronze markers are bronze, yes, but that they are also painted. so the marker won't look bronze; it will look like bronze with some ugly color painted on it. the "natural bronze" choice of background is tan painted, no where near bronze. and all the paint colors are horrible. and then you realize you have to choose textures. and they are ugly too. you can choose leather-like texture or pebble type texture or a patterned texture or stipple texture that looks like pimples. and they are all completely ugly. you'd want none of this weighing down on the earth above your loved one.

and i start crying.

end of Part 1