I Do This to Remember

When people ask me how or why I chose to get into this line of work, I tell them the story of my grandfather’s funeral.

Which, I know, is never what they’re expecting to hear. They assume I’ll cite a lifelong fascination with dinosaurs, or perhaps a penchant for piecing together puzzles. A few probably think I’ll tell them that I loved playing in sandboxes as a kid. And sure, I did think dinosaurs were cool. I still do. Everyone does, and if they say they don’t they’re lying. And yeah, I guess I liked playing with puzzles and making sandcastles. As much as the next kid, anyway. But none of those preconceived notions had anything to do with my choice to pursue archeology.

Like I said, it started at my grandfather’s funeral. Or, more accurately, at his burial.

I was six years old, and hadn’t yet learned about grief or loss when he died. Wrapping my head around the concept that I would never see him sitting in his rocking chair again, never hear him whistle a tune, never go on another walk through the park with him was a challenge. He’d played such a large role in my life that when he was suddenly just gone, it felt like an impossibility. But impossible things couldn’t hurt you, and the pain of his absence felt like a hole in my heart.

So when we got to the cemetery and I saw the gaping maw of the hole in the ground that was to be his grave, I sobbed into the sleeve of my mom’s dress. It was so dark and cold down there, full of bugs and rocks and mud. My grandfather loved the summer. He liked to go fishing in the sunlight, and enjoyed watching thunderstorms from the front porch. It already felt wrong to me that he was gone. To see him end up down there, surrounded by dank, damp dirt felt even worse.

I couldn’t watch when they lowered the coffin. I tore myself from my mom’s side and sprinted away through the maze of marble and granite headstones. She couldn’t follow me, of course. It was her father being buried, she needed to stay for that. My dad was preoccupied with my siblings and with trying to comfort my mother, so it wasn’t him that came after me, either.

Instead, it was my Aunt Holly.

She didn’t chase me down or reprimand me for running. She didn’t feed me platitudes about how my grandpa was in a better place now, or about how I needed to be brave. She didn’t even take my hand and try to lead me back to the gravesite. She simply swept her long, black skirt up into one hand and plopped down on the dew slicked grass beside me.

For a long time - or maybe it only felt like a long time because until then, no one else had let the silence linger for more than a few seconds - she didn’t say anything. I remember her looking down at me and giving me one of her warm smiles, and then I watched her pluck a white clover blossom from the grass. Wordlessly, she wrapped the stem around itself in a loop before sliding it towards the round flowerhead in one quick motion. The bloom shot off, landing a few feet away, and I gasped in surprise.

Aunt Holly only winked at me before plucking another clover and doing it again.

I caved after her third missile landed near the first two. “How do you do that?”

“What, this?” She asked, launching another. I sniffed and nodded, swiping at my face to dry my cheeks. “Oh, it’s easy. Here, I’ll show you.”

She did just that, still not uttering a word about what was going on behind us or how I needed to go back to my parents, only instructing me on how to get the right angle and the correct amount of tension on my clover stem to ensure that it flew far and true.

“Your Uncle George taught me how to do this,” she told me. “A long time ago, before you were even born. And you know who taught him?”

I remember thinking that I knew she was about to say my grandfather, but I shook my head anyway, hair flopping as I found another clover to practice on. “Who?”

“His dad.” She gave me a gentle nudge with her elbow. “Your Grandpa.”

Maybe it was the thought that he’d never get to teach me anything again. Maybe it was the realization that I wouldn’t get to surprise him with my newly acquired clover launching skill. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that Aunt Holly always seemed able to get me to open up without really asking me to. Either way, I caved again, turning towards her with my tear-streaked cheeks, fresh ones spilling.

“I don’t want him to go in the ground.” I tipped sideways into her, and she swiftly wrapped her arms around me. “I don’t want him to go down there.”

“How come?” Her tone was calm and soothing, curious and attentive. She didn’t try to change my mind without understanding what was on it.

“Because,” I whined, clutching at the soft fabric of her sweater. “It’s dark and cold. And there are bugs and things. It’s scary down there and I don’t want everyone to just forget about Grandpa.”

I sobbed, my small shoulders shaking under the warmth of her palm as it slid up and down my spine. “Oh, sweetpea.” She kissed the top of my head. “No one’s ever going to forget about Grandpa.”

“But-”

“You know why?” She leaned back just enough so that she could look me in the eye, bringing one hand up to rake her fingers through my hair. “Because when you love someone the way we all loved Grandpa, the way he loved all of us, you don’t forget that. You carry that with you always, everywhere you go.”

I sighed, and I could tell that she knew I was unsatisfied with that answer. It was similar to the one that my parents and everyone else had given me. Trite. Not that I knew that word at the time. Even without knowing what to call it though, I knew I didn’t like the lack of comfort in those words.

“That’s only one reason, though,” she told me, tilting her head at an angle that suggested she knew a secret. “Do you want to know the other one?”

Blinking, I nodded enthusiastically, hooked on the hope that Aunt Holly’s secret reason would ease the hurt the way the rest of the world’s reason could only pretend to. “What is it?”

“Well,” she began, leaning close. “You said that under the ground it was cold and scary and dark, right?” I nodded again. “I can see why you would think that, but it’s actually not true.”

Other adults in my life might have spun some fantasy to make me feel better, but not Aunt Holly. I knew that if she was telling me something, she believed it herself. “Really?”

“Really.” She raised her hands to gesture at everything around us. “Look. All these trees and the grass, those flowers over there-” She pointed out a bright yellow forsythia bush, and when I turned to look, she quickly plucked a clover and shot the blossom at my ear before I could turn back. In spite of the sadness, I giggled at the contact as she continued. “These clovers? It all grows from the ground. From the Earth. How could it be cold and scary and still make all these beautiful things?”

She had a point, though I wasn’t entirely sold yet. Which, of course, she knew.

“And,” she went on, “the Earth remembers things. Even things that we forget or that we never even knew in the first place.” She gave the ground beside her a gentle pat. “So you don’t have to worry about your Grandpa, Sweetpea. We’ll always remember him, and so will the Earth.”

Years later I’d tell my mom what Aunt Holly had said to make me feel better. “Oh, that’s such a Holly thing to say,” she’d chuckle. My aunt had somewhat of a reputation for being a bit unconventional - I’d even heard people refer to her as a hippie or a witch. Never in a derogatory sense, always more as a method of explanation - “Holly has her own way of looking at things.” There would be a good-natured smirk or wink that accompanied that statement, as if to accentuate her harmlessness.

To me, though, what she told me that day was much more than just harmless. It was much more than just silliness. What she said implanted itself deep in my brain, taking root and helping to shape the way I’d think about life and loss and memory and discovery for the rest of my life.

Because on that day, it was what I needed to hear to help with how I was feeling about saying goodbye to my grandfather. But as I got older, as I had new experiences and learned new things, I saw how Aunt Holly’s words still rang true.

The following year at school we did a time capsule project. Everyone in my class had to choose something meaningful to add, and then we buried the capsule for future students to dig up so they could see what our lives were like with one hundred years separating them from us. The ground, the dirt, the Earth closed around the capsule and all our keepsakes and kept them safe, kept our memories preserved.

A decade or so later I was on vacation with my family. We’d gone on a camping and hiking trip, and one of the trails we hiked passed through some old claypits. It had recently rained, and several rocks and pieces of petrified wood had surfaced as a result. A glint of golden-orange caught my eye against the reddish brown soil, so I bent down to pull it free. When I opened my fist I gasped in excited delight at the amber fossil I held, the delicate, lacy wings of a dragonfly still perfectly preserved.

I’d look at squirrels burying acorns and think about how they would soon forget where they’d stashed their treats, but the Earth wouldn’t. They’d become trees under her care, growing far too tall to be forgotten.

I’d see people beachcombing with metal detectors, finding lost engagement rings from decades past and think about how no matter the reason that the ring ended up embedded in the sand, the Earth remembered that that ring had once encircled a finger. That it symbolized a promise of love and devotion between two people.

I grew a sort of obsession surrounding the idea of all the hidden memories there were to be found, to be brought back to the light. Missing links in scientific advancements. Clues for solving mysteries. Lost trinkets and toys. Entire civilizations we knew nothing about until some pottery or jewelry was unearthed to tell us the story of who those people were, how they lived, what was important to them. It all fascinated me.

So when I chose to become an archeologist, no one was surprised, least of all Aunt Holly.

But when I decided to take my expertise off-world and head up a dig on Kiplar-B, a newly discovered, “Earth-like” planet in another galaxy, no one understood. No one but Aunt Holly.

“They think there might have been sentient life on Kiplar,”I’d told my aunt, my excitement reflected back at me in her eyes, now bracketed by wrinkles but never losing their warm, curious, encouraging light. “Thousands of years ago. And scans indicate that there might be artifacts buried in the topsoil, and-”

“Well of course there are, Sweetpea.” She’d never stopped calling me that. “And if Kiplar is as much like Earth as they say, then I’m sure she took care of those memories. Now it’s up to you to go find them.”

I never saw my Aunt Holly again. The trip to Kiplar and back home took nearly the next two decades of my life, and the rest of hers along with it. I missed her funeral by three years.

When I finally returned to Earth, I stopped at the cemetery where she and my Grandpa were buried. I walked the winding paths between the field of headstones that a six-year-old me had tried to outrun until I found the family plot. I smiled as I sat on the dewy ground. It was completely blanketed in clover.

Plucking the largest one I could find, I wrapped the stem around itself and sent the blossom flying. I hadn’t done that in ages, but the technique came back to me as naturally as breathing, and I couldn’t help the small laugh that slipped out. I knew that if Holly were there, she would have laughed too.

“You were right about Kiplar, Aunt Holly,” I told her, fingers gliding over the clover patch to snag another one. “We found tons of artifacts and animal fossils, all in perfect condition.” I launched the next blossom. “She kept them safe. She remembered.”

A few tears slid down my cheek as I imagined getting to tell her, really tell her, about all of our findings and the theories behind them. She was the one who lit that flame in me, the one who made sure it stayed lit. I let them fall unfettered, tasting salt on my tongue as I went on.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t here to say goodbye.” Glancing at the granite stone that bore her name, I swallowed the rest of my tears and let my lips curve into a slight grin. “I did something for you, though, before I left to come home.”

On the last day of our dig on Kiplar, when the team had finished packing up and clearing out all of the equipment that we brought with us and all of the specimens and relics that we found, I lingered at the site. Kneeling down in the dirt that so closely resembled the claypits where I found my very first fossil, my very first uncovered memory of a time and a life long gone by, I pulled a small object out of my pocket. I squeezed my fist tightly around it, as though trying to leave an imprint of myself on its surface, then I opened my hand and looked down at the stone disk in my palm.

It was a round piece of Kiplar shale, the size and shape of a poker chip, that I had saved from the very first day of our expedition. Using my pocketknife, I carved a short inscription into the soft sedimentary surface. For Aunt Holly. May Kiplar always remember her. I even added a clover. Or, well, I intended it to be a clover. I never claimed to be an artist, and I knew the only person who it mattered to would have known what it was immediately, no matter how crude my carving ability was. I dug a small hole in the dirt and set the shale chip in it, then covered it back up, patting the soil twice before standing and leaving to join the rest of the crew as we prepared to depart the planet.

So when people ask me how or why I chose this line of work, I tell them this story. I tell them that I chose it so that no one is forgotten, no memory ever fades completely. Because if the Earth remembers, so should we. I tell them that I do this to remember all the things we never knew.