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It has been 7 years since that significant Memorial Day when I found flowers at my great-aunt’s grave. Worn silk flowers thoughtfully planted in the ground.
Who left them? Other than my husband and I, there are no other relatives who live nearby to visit her grave. She and her husband didn’t have children to ask.
Could they be from be a jilted lover or long-lost relative? Were they meant for her husband, perhaps brought from a love child or secret romance? Or maybe they blew off another grave on a windy day and a good citizen planted them were found.
What if you were the one who found them not only that day, but saw them for several years later as they clung to the ground? How would you respond? Would you hone your private investigator skills to solve this mystery right away? Or shrug it off as no big deal?
For me, I knew I that very moment that I had stumbled into the critical missing piece of the story I needed to fulfill my dream of writing a historic novel about my family’s survival of the 1915 Armenian Genocide and journey to the United States.
In my debut novel to be released later this year, you will meet my great-aunt Vicky who died two weeks before I was born and for whom I was named. You will also meet her fierce sisters, most of whom are also buried in the same cemetery.
To learn more about the debut novel being released this year, visit my website and follow/like/comment on my Facebook or LinkedIn author pages.
The photo above is the actual photo I took from my cell phone on May 23, 2015 at North Burial Grounds in Providence, Rhode Island.
We continue to visit the graves at least twice a year and bring flowers every Memorial Day. Here’s a gallery of photos taken this year of Vicky’s sisters and brothers-in-law who you will get to know and love in the novel.
On this Memorial Day, I hope you will join me in praying for and remembering deceased loved ones and all those who have died in active military service. God bless and rest in peace.
Thank you for reading my blog,
Victoria