This is what happened: Rose Hill at 02:01

There's something beautiful about this picture that I couldn't put into words.

But if I had to try...


I turned off the engine, finally, after having driven for an hour. This time, we didn't get lost winding up the many zigzags of Rose Hill, and found the right terrace after a left at the chapel, right, left, and one more right. I got out to stretch and look at the smog of Pasadena.

I got the Costco flowers from the backseat as my mom got a plastic Kohl's bag from the trunk. I tried to find the gravestone, but the grass had been pretty freshly mown, and all of them were obscured by the same layer of dead grass. I brushed off two of them with my shoe before finding my grandpa's portait with a pink background.

I tried to brush off more with my shoe as my mom came next to me. She immediately knelt and scooped up the dead grass in handfuls, and tossed them aside. I set the flowers down and also shoveled with my hands.

I don't know how to grieve. I don't know how to respect the dead, but I can get my hands dirty.

We tried to look for the holes in the grass below the gravestone to put the flowers in, but the grass looked perfectly uniform. I tried to pull at the grass, hard, to reveal some new patch that had been put accidentally put over, but found nothing. My mom took from the bag a small sickle and pruning shears, and started cutting back the grass around the gravestone, "before they get crazy."

I finally found an artificial slit in the soil and dug my fingers in, ripping out grass and roots and dirt in cubic inch chunks. I needed the shears to tear through some thicker clumps of roots, before I could remove the two rusted metal containers for flowers. I took both of them to the fountain to hose off dirt from both the containers and my hands.

I brought them back, filled with water, and placed them back in the holes. My mom tried to put all the flowers in one vase, but there were too many. She took everything out of the wrappers to arrange them into each vase. I took the shears and the sickle to rinse off, and took a picture.