Tradition---literary version

   A long time ago, I read that it was impossible to begin a tradition.I don't exactly know how that would work out, but the practice of visiting the graves of loved ones on Memorial Day reaches back far into my memory.
    My mother lost her mother in 1950 and she was very sad for a very long time. My father used to drive us to the cemetery, St. John's in Troy.  When Helen came to live with us a few years later, she would also go with us. They would plant flowers on the grave, geraniums, which my grandmother always had in her flower garden, just beneath the kitchen window, "over home."  I have always associated the smell of geraniums with Nanny's house, and later with the annual and melancholy Memorial visits.
   My father died in 1966 and was buried in the cemetery in Schaghticoke, so now there were two cemeteries to visit. Still a sad day of mourning, but that would change. I was doing the driving then, and in 1970 a newcomer joined our observances and sparked a new joy in remembering the dead. In a few years, with two kids, there was less grief and more life. After paying our respects and when the geraniums were installed in the urns, a new tradition, if I may call it that, began. That was stopping for ice cream cones, which all, and maybe especially  Helen, enjoyed immensely.
      We did that faithfully for a number of years, until my mother's death in 1983. By then, there were two teens and a six-year-old, and I'm a little cloudy on the visits from then on. I'm pretty sure the older kids still went, until they left for college.  By then Dorothy would go with me, and I'm sure the youngest child. I know I made the visit every year, and have a memory of the last time a child accompanied us.
     After Dorothy died in 2011, I still  make the visits, though I have given up going to the cemetery in Troy where my grandmother, Helen and Matt, as well as Ann, are all buried. The cemetery, in financial deficit, no longer had the caretaker in his cottage at the entrance to the cemetery. I was there alone that last day, and had the uneasy feeling that someone was watching me. There was a lot of terrain and hillsides, so I have not gone back, not by myself.
     So I'm still uncertain of how the  definition of "tradition" would apply. Can a tradition which once involved many be upheld by a single person, even if that person was the solitary observer for at least a decade? And do traditions expire on the death of the last participant? (The ice cream cone rider was abandoned years ago.