I can't explain where, after thirty-one years, the need to visit my mother's grave came from. I was driving south on Highway 99, thinking about this and wondering what to expect when I got there. I first started feeling this need a few months earlier and had ordered a copy of her death certificate from the Office of Vital Statistics in Sacramento. The death certificate gave me information that I had never known: what the coroner had determined to be the cause of death, where she was found, that she had been cremated, and where she was buried.

My older brother, who was then twenty-one, had made all the arrangements for cremation and burial. He had not seen the urn that mother was put in, nor the grave plot where she was buried. Our family handled difficult times by getting the job done, ignoring the pain and "bucking up"