We must have looked like death. Days after saying hello and goodbye to our sweet Vivian, my husband and I arrived at the cemetery office to choose her final resting place. As foreign and isolating as it felt, we might as well have landed on the moon. The office was drab and dreary with brown paneling on the walls, bare bones necessities, disorganized old desks with piles of papers and notebooks. It smelled of must and second hand smoke. We were greeted by a woman who asked what we needed. She turned to another woman in the back who looked very busy, didn't make eye contact with us, could clearly hear what we said, and waved us over to her desk. She got right to business and pulled out a map of burial plots and suggested a couple of spots by a tree.
Baby Land was a designated area where babies could be buried for a smaller fee and be exhumed at any time to be relocated with his/her parents whenever their plots were chosen (which we weren't prepared to do that day). She would have been quite happy for us to have signed on the dotted line, paid the fees and been on our way; she clearly had more important things on her mind. We asked if we could see the area and plots available before making our decision. With her facial expressions, you would've thought we asked her to go ahead and book our flight to the moon. She grabbed her keys and picked us up in a black Ford Crown Victoria out front. If it hadn't been for my husband to speak up and ask her to stop, she would've done a slow rolling drive by in front of Baby Land pointing out her recommended plots. Was this really happening? Did she think our daughter's final resting place was worth just a nod of our heads through a car window?
We made our choice, signed on the dotted line and paid our fees. I hated everything about this burial plot buying experience. Everything. I despised the name of the place (with connotations similar to Michael Jackson's Neverland), the lady we put out with our time, the thought of burying our daughter in the cold, black ground where I saw no beauty, and the task ahead of picking the perfect headstone to represent all that Vivian was to us. We were weighted down in bulky space suits. We were drowning in the domino effects of the miserable dark finality of the death of our daughter and this experience just added to the awful.
