The Inurnment of Mr. Clardy

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© 2002 R.C. Barajas

t is a huge place, Arlington Cemetery.

“Marble orchard” would not be an accurate term. These rows of white slabs have fallen from no tree. They seem instead to push up from the earth, emerging from the green, tended grass more like the sun-seeking tops of root vegetables. There are lots of them. Regiments. Squadrons. Fleets.

The cemetery currently covers 200 acres and has more than 260,000 people buried there, whom almost 4 million people visit annually.

And to think it all started in Robert E. Lee's back yard in his beloved Arlington. With an extended middle finger, the Union grimly planted the dead right up to his doorstep.

I was at the cemetery to attend the memorial service for Warren Davenport Clardy, 1913 - 2002. He and his wife Betty owned our house for 35 years before selling it to us.

Mr. Clardy had handed his house over to us so gently, so thoughtfully, that it almost seemed we were being willed the thing. “Good vibes” don't factor into the sale price of a house, but if they had, we would never have been able to afford this place.

And of course, what was left behind in their house became the basis for my recent flurry of artistic activity, the seeds for Everyday Household Objects. Is it an odd thing that he should pass away on the very day I hung the last piece in the gallery? If I believed in such things, I would get an eerie chill.

But I don't.

Instead what I felt was a need to say thank you, and attending his funeral seemed to be my last chance to do that.

I went with our neighbor. It was he who called me Sunday night to tell me the news. He said that Mr. Clardy had been a superb neighbor, had always been liberal, not "closed off to things and ideas" as he put it. I already knew that from the mail that still comes addressed to him. Pleas for money from human rights, family planning, poverty and disease-fighting groups. A man doesn't get on all those lists by sitting on his hands.

Friends and family gathered in one of the waiting rooms at Arlington Cemetery (I was neither friend nor family so what was my role, I wondered; Beneficiary? Scavenger?). Mr. Clardy's large, multi-generational family stood and greeted all who entered. There were few tears. He had been 88, and had died peacefully in his sleep having been fully active up to the end, I overheard his wife of 60 years saying.

So many of the family looked familiar to me, though I'd never met any of them. I suppose there is a certain similarity among family members at funerals.

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