Yesterday I went to the cemetery.  As I told you in yesterday’s post, The Rescued Photo did some research on a kid who died when Babu and he were in high school based on a post I wrote from her diary.  Some of the information she gave me was that Stanley was buried in St. Stanislas Cemetery.  So I went there, phone camera in hand.

It wasn’t until I drove in the gate that I remembered something.

Driving respectfully slow, I followed the tiny cemetery roads looking for Midura.  I found it almost immediately.

I never know what is appropriate to do with my car at the cemetery.  There never seems to be a parking lot and things are really close, but I pulled my car over, parked and got out.

There it was, Stanley Midura’s family plot.

I thought about all the information on this stone.  A way to keep this family’s memory alive.  I looked around and saw the dates on some of the stones and knew that this stone would be here a long while, bearing the last call to remembrance of this family.

When I wrote the original post, I wondered who would still be around to remember him.  He died so young that there would be no children.  When you die so young, how could you ever make a lasting mark on history?  Too young to own a store, build a building and put your name on it, too young to have published a poem, sold a beautiful painting.  And then The Rescued Photo told me his brother died as well.  It felt almost as if I was writing about someone that had been erased from history.

This stone told me a different story.  It seems as though Stanley had a sister, Helen, the middle child.  She married Anthony and possibly had children of her own.  It’s amazing to think, her brothers both died so young but she lived until 2007! She was in her 20s when both of her brothers passed so she had many memories of them.  Did she ever tell her children about John and Stanley?  If she did then their memory lives on.