Unsere Ella

Completely true. Happened a few years ago. Sometimes I still wake up and hear that little laugh, and I've never forgotten her. Every time I visit, I leave her a rose.

Walking alone
Amidst the graves
Feeling the residual sadness around me,
With the flowers given
In attempts to alleviate the pain
Brought by visits to
This horrible place
Shining with spots of color
That seem out of place.

My grandmother is here,
Buried in the ground.
In a box,
Safe from the elements.
She has a stone over her head,
With beautifully done carvings
Showing who she was.

My mother and sister are here
Above the ground,
Attempting to make
Cheerful conversation,
Thinking I'm afraid.

But I'm not.
I may be young, but I know
That this is a place for silence,
For peace,
And for death.
Here, nothing can hurt me.
I am simply
Sad.

I wander among the
Beautiful headstones,
Wondering who they were.
A time of birth,
A time of death,
And a list of roles they played
Tell me what they did,
Not who they were.
I stare at the lovely decorations and wonder
If the dead
Feel any cheer at the beauty,
Or if they are indifferent
To the living world
They once inhabited.

Even in my slow,
Random wanderings,
I almost miss
The little stone
Tucked away in the shadows
Cast by the two larger ones on either side.
But I see it,
And my curiosity is piqued,
For the grave is dusty,
And weeds grow on it-
No spots of color decorate
This headstone.

I approach it
And clear it off,
Revealing a simple headstone,
The carvings worn away,
The times of birth and death almost unreadable.
Little carvings of leaves decorate the top.
I squint at the dates,
And gasp in pain,
For the dates
Are but ten years apart.

I fall to my knees,
Feeling as if I've lost a dear friend
I hadn't seen in a long time.
I catch a glimpse of the name-
Ella
And feel as if I'd known it all along.

By looking at other tombstones
And tracing the names
I find that she is my great-great aunt.
She is buried between her parents.

I take one of the flowers
I was supposed to leave on my grandmother's grave,
And place it amidst the weeds.
I know
She'll appreciate knowing
That someone remembers her.

As I walk around the stone
To rejoin my own family,
To create the future she never got,
I spot one more carving on the back of the headstone.
It's German, and it reads:
"Unsere Ella."
But I do not know what it means.

When we go home,
We go to bed,
For it has been a long, tiring day.
But when I fall asleep, something happens.

I awaken in my dream
And find myself in front of a house
I've never seen before.
And standing before me is a little girl
With brown hair
And green eyes,
With dirty, pockmarked skin,
And a small smile on her face.
She says something I don't understand,
And holds something out.
It's the rose
That I placed on her grave.
She places it in her hair, and laughs,
And runs into the house.
When I awaken,
I can hear that laugh echoing
And the scent of that rose
Floats in the air.

The next day,
I went to a language translator,
And type in:
Unsere Ella.
The meaning makes me smile,
For those two little words
Probably mean more
To that laughing little girl
Than any flower,
Any intricate headstone,
Any well-meaning prayer
Ever could.
For they mean:
"Our Ella."

Author's Note

Yes. it's long. I know.