Category: a pictorial walk through the cemetery

By Monday night, it had been darkness for 36 hours, a day and a half since I knew my son was gone. I usually see God in the details of life during the hardest of times, but He was just nowhere to be found in Alex’s death. All night long, I begged God for a sign that HE is in this situation. I just wasn’t seeing Him in any of the details, and I needed to see Him. I asked for my fleece like Gideon had done. 

Tuesday, it was time to go to the cemetery to pick out a gravesite. I had something very specific in mind, but I tried not to get my hopes up because I thought it unlikely the location would actually be available. I told the man that I was hoping for a plot in one of the sections next to where our daughter is buried. (I knew Alex couldn’t be in the same section because Abby’s section is reserved for babies and young children.)

He pulled out a map and circled the ”Garden of Innocence,” indicating where Abby was buried, and then he put a pencil mark on one of the three plots he had planned to show us. YES! We drove to the spot and it was exactly where I had hoped. I looked around and thought Alex would have liked it. In the shade of evergreens and right across the little road from where Abby was, it was perfect.

We returned to the office to finish the paperwork and after we had wrapped up and were heading to the elevator to leave, I turned around and thanked the man and said the plot was everything I had wanted and was somehow even more perfect than I had imagined. 

He said the interesting thing was that it had originally been part of a double plot that had been purchased, but the owner had sold it back to the cemetery as a single plot in 1999. 

Alex was born in 1999, so this plot has remained unclaimed, unwanted, unpurchased for 24 years and it was exactly what I wanted. Ok, Lord, thanks! This is YOU being in the details for me. Somehow this space had been reserved for him since the year of his birth.

Below is a photo taken during the graveside service. At the bottom in the foreground is my daughter’s grave, off in the distance is my son’s gravesite. I asked the photographer to take this photo to illustrate how close they are.