A Family Visit

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It used to be, Marianne and I had to drive three hundred miles to visit her parents. Today, alas, it takes less than a hundred.

Yesterday, Marianne and I drove to the military cemetery in Ft. Indiantown Gap to visit her father, William Christian Porter and mother Mary Ann Porter. The cemetery is beautiful and quiet and, the stones being all of a size, there is a touching democracy of death.

Death is something the military forces understand well.I've been to a lot of military funerals and they're always deeply moving.

Marianne's mother's remains were interred some while ago, though. We just came to visit and to see that the stone had been carved in accord with her wishes. As it was. It had taken some argument with the VA officials, but they finally agreed to let her have her way: If you look closely at the stone, you'll see that under her husband's name are his dates of birth and death, but under hers only the date of death.

Her age was nothing that a woman of her generation would have made public.

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