Saint Boniface Cemetery is the setting for one of Brett Bohlinger’s most painful encounters with her father’s memory. Returning after seven years, she finds no easy peace at his grave: instead, the cemetery gives physical form to a history of abandonment, a mother’s enduring devotion, and a daughter’s long-held wish to have been loved. Brett leaves having spoken to her father, but not having resolved the hurt that brought her there.

Setting and Earlier Visit

Brett’s last visit to Saint Boniface Cemetery was with her mother, Elizabeth Bohlinger, seven years earlier. They had been on their way somewhere—Brett thinks it may have been Christmas shopping—when Elizabeth insisted on a detour to her husband’s grave. The day was bitterly cold. Wind drove the little snow into whirling eddies as mother and daughter struggled to fasten an evergreen wreath to the headstone.

The details of that visit are inseparable from Brett’s memory of watching her mother grieve. Back in the car, Brett started the engine, warmed her hands at the vents, and saw Elizabeth standing silently with her head bowed. Her mother dabbed her eyes with a glove and made the sign of the cross. Brett pretended to adjust the radio rather than meet her gaze. At the time, she felt embarrassed by Elizabeth’s continued devotion to a man who had abandoned her. The cemetery therefore holds not only the father Brett lost, but also an earlier version of Brett: a child who could see her mother’s sorrow and still judge it from a distance.

Brett’s Return to the Grave

On her return, the season and weather reverse the conditions of that winter visit. It is a glorious autumn day, with a clear blue sky and a soft breeze moving the leaves. Brett sees squirrels searching for nuts beneath the walnut trees; otherwise, she is alone in the beautiful hillside cemetery. The open, sunlit setting offers little concealment from the conversation she has come to have.

Before entering, Brett rereads her mother’s instruction to push herself toward the things that frighten her, then puts the letter in her pocket. At the grave, she brushes dried leaves from the base of the headstone and sits on its marble slab. She asks her father whether he wonders why she has come after all these years, and whether she is like her mother in being unable to hate him. Her questions establish the visit’s tension: she has come because Elizabeth urged her to make contact, but she is also confronting a resentment that has shaped her understanding of their relationship.

The Headstone and the Photograph

Brett brings a worn photograph from her wallet, carefully worked free from between her library card and gym membership. It is the only picture she has kept of herself with her father. Taken by Elizabeth on Christmas morning when Brett was six, it shows the child in red flannel pajamas perched at the edge of his knee, her hands folded as if she were praying to get away. Charles Jacob Bohlinger has one pale hand on her shoulder, the other hanging limply at his side; his uncertain smile and flat eyes make the image an unsettling record of physical closeness without visible warmth.

The photograph gives Brett a specific childhood scene to hold against the grave’s engraved name. She asks what about her had made it so difficult for her father to smile or put his arms around her. Her grief gathers around the fear that she was never good enough for him, and she names the praise she wanted but says she never heard: that she was good, smart, or pretty. The grave does not answer. Brett’s questions and the old picture instead expose how thoroughly the child’s effort to earn affection has survived into adulthood.

Narrative Significance

The visit ends without reconciliation. Brett tells her father that the attempt to establish a relationship was her mother’s idea and that she had given up on that dream years ago. She traces the engraved name, wishes him peace, and walks away before breaking into a run. The departure is both an acknowledgment of the grave and a refusal to pretend that a single visit has repaired the past.

Saint Boniface Cemetery also changes meaning across the two visits. In the earlier memory, Brett watches Elizabeth mourn and protects her mother’s dignity by looking away; in the present, Brett speaks her own grief aloud. The evergreen wreath and sign of the cross belong to Elizabeth’s ritual of remembrance, while Brett’s photograph, questions, and fingertips on the inscription make her visit a distinct act of reckoning. The cemetery is thus less a place of closure than a setting where inherited feeling becomes impossible to ignore: Brett can recognize her mother’s attachment without simply repeating it, and can leave her father’s grave still wounded but having finally addressed him.