First I blogged on how I was going to go find my sister  and everything seemed set for me to go ("Finally..."), then I blogged about the angel in disguise who told me right where she was buried and now the conclusion.

 I went on out to South Dakota and had a pretty good time.  I stopped in Pierre on the way out and got her records in all of five minutes.  Then, having forgotten how depressing Pierre was (all the hotels are on the main drag and it's sort of dumpy and ugly even though other parts of the city are beautiful), we drove on.  We ended up in a small, locally-owned motel in Wall (I'd recommend it to anyone... it's the green one by the gas stations and the Dairy Queen just off I-90) where we did the touristy thing and wandered around Wall Drug.    It was... interesting.  The world's largest tourist trap built out of nothing.

Friday morning we went into Rapid City, had breakfast and went to the cemetery.  My sister was in the baby section.  I found the section easily but then didn't find her stone immediately.  I started searching methodically row by row and was getting quite upset (there were a lot of sad little cement bricks that just said "infant _______" and many of them were broken or unreadable and a few were missing altogether even though it was obvious that there had been one at one time) when my friend just kind of wandered off and walked straight to my sister's stone.  I was upset at the prospect that she might be lost to time forever... and that whatever babies were there and you couldn't read the stones for whatever reason WERE lost to time. 

It appears that my grandmother never forgot her.  Sometime in the late 80s she went through and replaced the stones in our family plot with a specific type of flat stone (there's the family monument and then there are flat plot markers).  My sister's stone matches those in the family plot all those many hundreds of miles away.  I'm betting that Grandma went ahead and ordered one for her when she did the rest.  I don't think my father knew about that.  He didn't mention it when he told me the rest about her.  I'm glad she's got a durable stone... I wish I could do the same for all the rest of the babies there.

I don't know what my friend was expecting but I guess it wasn't the reaction I had.  She was running around trying to give me "private time" while I just really went there, took a couple pictures of it and was ready to go about my day.  Of course it was important to me... obviously... I spent several hundred dollars and drove over 1000 miles to do it but I don't really see much point in howling "my sister" and having some sort of emotional breakdown over the headstone of someone who lived for three days over 50 years ago. I did what I needed to do... I brought her into reality from the land of conjecture and storytelling.  I will remember her on her birthday and the anniversary of her death (September 14 and 17) even though I probably won't do anything special to mark the occasion.  I will remember what her short life gave to my father and me all those years later.  But I'm not going to make a fool of myself in a public place over her.  I'm just not that kind of person.

After we finished up at the cemetery we toured around the Black Hills a little and went out to the Badlands National Park at sunset.  I got some awesome photographs... I'm sure some will turn up here and there as I go through them (I took about 150 shots... it's going to be a while before I've picked through them all).

And, if you're ever in Rapid City, South Dakota in the Mountain View cemetery... go on over to lot 38, walk out by the tree standing all by itself and look for a dark grey granite plot stone with a pink/red granite border that says Susan P______ and know that at least that one baby isn't forgotten and never will be.

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