Visting Relatives

[deguspice]

  After I dropped quietann off at the car dealership in Wakefield today, I went down the street to visit Uncle Nate.  He's my father's father's uncle.

  I never actually met him in person because died in 1938.  He's buried at the Temple Israel Cemetery in Wakefield.  So once in a while I stop by the cemetery to say "hello" and see how he's doing.  I first visited him shortly after I moved to Wakefield (in 1989?) when my father explained to me that I wasn't the first family member to move to Wakefield. 

  In Judaism, there's a tradition of leaving a pebble on top of a gravestone to let others know that someone visited.  The cemetery has a small bucket of pebbles next to the gate so you don't have to search for a pebble.  I've never found a pebble on Uncle Nate's gravestone, so I don't know if anyone else ever visits him.  Some of the other gravestones had a few pebbles on top, and one or two had rather large stones on top.  I couldn't help wondering where these stones came from, they certainly didn't come from the small bucket.

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[marmota.livejournal.com]

A couple of weeks before Rosh Hashanah, I got together with my parents to do the rounds of semi-local cemetaries; visiting the relatives, as it were. It's a yearly custom, of sorts. I have plenty of rocks and gravel around from gardening, and just grabbed a pocketful before going. Some places don't provide it.

By the way, one thing I'd heard, which could of course be totally wrong considering how bad I am at being a jew, is that you place a pebble when saying Kaddish, the hope being that when ten of them have been placed, hopefully God will see it as having been said by a minyan