The Tulips and the Stone
by Elizabeth Rau

The day my husband found out that his mother’s cancer had spread he sat down with our boys, then aged 4 and 5, and told them that the doctor couldn’t help grandma and that she was going to die. The boys knew she had been in the hospital and they had seen her many times at home feeling poorly, but it never occurred to them that she wouldn’t get better. My oldest son, Peder, burst into tears. “I don’t want grandma to die,’’ he said, sobbing so hard his body was shaking. “Tell her not to die.’’

That night, as he was putting the boys to bed, my husband talked calmly to our sons about what would happen afterward. We would keep grandma’s old Victorian so they could still kick a ball in her backyard, slide down her bulkhead and dodge cobwebs in her creepy basement. She would be buried nearby in a place called Swan Point Cemetery, where she liked to take walks among the grand pin oaks. And she would have something called a gravestone, a big rock engraved with her name. Peder asked if he could design it.

Early in his life, Peder was drawn to the arts. When he was a toddler I set up an easel in our living room and made sure the plastic cups were always full of fresh paint. He liked to paint rainbows, great arcs of blue and green with a dash of black to represent the passage of dark clouds. I called the paintings his rainbow series, and taped them over the windows at the top of the stairs where the morning sun comes through strong.

His painting period ended around the age of 4 when he discovered the books of the architectural illustrator David Macaulay and realized that an intricate drawing of, say, a stapler was art, too. Over the years, he put his No. 2 pencil to paper and drew elaborate illustrations of whatever caught his fancy: bridges, fire trucks, airplanes, sailboats, football fields, golf courses, ski trails, even an old apple press. Why not his grandmother’s gravestone?

Henry, my younger son, was unfamiliar with gravestones but Peder had seen his fair share during weekend tricycle rides on the flat roads at Swan Point. Still, he needed some guidance and feedback: Would grandma prefer a tall stone or a wide one? What color would she want: black, rose or gray? It was Peder who decided the stone should have a decorative engraving of either tulips or roses, which my mother-in-law loved equally and whose remnants remained in the form of a curled leaf or faded petal when she died just before her 80th birthday. He settled on tulips.

Grandchildren came late in my mother-in-law’s life. I can’t help but believe that before the boys’ births she had made peace with the possibility that she might not become a grandmother. How thrilled she must’ve been when her only child – my husband – married and had not one, but two boys. She lived minutes away so she saw them nearly every day and graciously allowed them to run free in her yard with its thick coat of luxurious grass to cushion the many falls. She always had chocolate cookies on her kitchen counter and coffee milk in the clunky Hotpoint refrigerator she bought in 1949. The boys felt completely at ease in her presence. Indeed, her house was one of their favorite destinations, more popular than a trip to the ice-cream shop. It was heartbreaking for them to lose her.

After the talk with his dad, Peder sat down at our kitchen table and drew the first of several illustrations of what he thought the gravestone should look like. He eventually chose a tall stone with a serpentine arc. He wrote my mother-in-law’s name in his best penmanship, Carol Johnson Schaefer, and the dates of her birth, Nov. 28, 1925, and her death, Nov. 1, 2005. The tulips proved to be the most challenging aspect of the design. How to express the simplicity of a tulip on a slab of stone? He found his answer one morning at the local library, the Providence Athenaeum, after mentioning to the children’s librarian that he was designing his grandmother’s gravestone. A few days later, she appeared at our doorstep with a book about the history of tulips in Holland, complete with glorious illustrations, which Peder studied with an intensity usually reserved for one of his airplane books.

One Saturday afternoon, my husband took the boys and the sketch to a Providence monument company, which my husband had passed by many times as a boy during his weekly Sunday car ride to his grandmother’s house in the country, never once imagining that he would one day find himself inside the lot’s chain-link fence selecting a stone for his dead mother. John, the owner, gave everyone a tour and together they selected a stone of gray granite from Barrie, Vermont. My husband told John he had specific requests for the engraving and handed him Peder’s design. A few weeks later, we received the company’s layout in the mail. The name and dates were correct, but Peder complained that the flowers were all wrong. They looked more like cornstalks – without the corn. My husband asked for a new design. I chuckle when I think of good-natured John back at the drafting table, at the behest of a 5-year-old kid. My mother-in-law would have gotten a kick out of that, too. 
 
The new design was perfect. My husband ordered the stone and it was delivered to the cemetery just before the first anniversary of my mother-in-law’s death. On a sunny afternoon, we made a special trip to the cemetery to see it. We drove slowly along North Way, peering out the windows, searching for Peder’s creation, and when we spotted it the boys flew out of the car. Peder inspected it first to make sure it was up to his high standards of artistry. It was. And then the boys did something remarkable. They ran their hands over the polished granite and two tulips. They hid behind the stone and popped their heads up over the arc. They climbed on the base – Henry on one side, Peder on the other – and carried on a conversation about the top’s rough, rock-pitch surface. They leaned against the stone; they hugged it. Peder designed the gravestone to help him cope with his grandmother’s death, and seeing it now brought her alive again. We’ve been back many times and each visit is full of joy, not sorrow. The boys own that gravestone; it is theirs.

Elizabeth Rau’s essays and articles have appeared in The Providence Journal, The Boston Globe, The Baltimore Sun and the East Side Monthly. She lives in Providence with her husband and two sons.

Previous page

Back to Table of Contents

Next page