Cemetery

Up a winding road, past houses that’ve been alive far longer than I have, there’s a wrought iron mouth. I’ve been up this road several times but I still couldn’t tell you how to get there. Perhaps I should have paid more attention. Perhaps some part of me never wanted to know how to get there.

It feels as if there should be wrought iron gates attached to this gaping mouth, but there aren’t, so the car glides inside. Beyond the gate-less mouth the road is smooth for only a few blinks of the eye and then it turns to dust. It narrows and winds and splits in different directions and no matter what vehicle you’re in, you can feel every dip and bump and rock beneath the tires.

When I come, I come in the summer, when towering rhododendron bushes bursting with pink flowers tower above the SUV. The trees and bushes and flowers may die each year, but at least they have the privilege of springing back to life. 

We come to another fork in the road. To the right is the future that I vehemently abhor and to the left are my grandparents. Luckily, with a crunch, the tires shift and take us left. 

The sensation of chirping birds and warm sunshine and flora carpeting the surrounding area is an assault on the senses. The amount of life present here in this museum of death never ceases to feel wrong, like when a toddler is forcefully banging a square peg against a round hole or a novice musician is playing a tune and missing notes. 

I imagine that this place in the winter is more fitting, when the leaves have withered and fallen away, when snow buries the cheerful greenery, when the Earth turns as cold and dead as it ought to be in a cemetery. 

And painfully, I am reminded that that’s when most people die - the winter. And that I have missed my grandma’s funeral because I was not yet born. I missed my other grandmother’s funeral because I was far away in college. I went to my first grandfather’s funeral because I was just a child and still lived in Pennsylvania. And I missed my other grandfather’s funeral because my Dad wanted to go alone. 

It’s not fair that I missed all of these funerals. It makes my stomach feel as sour as if I had just eaten a bowl full of Halloween candy; sick, with a heady rush of sugar fueled panic. But they weren’t aware that I couldn’t make it, were they? 

I look around at the other headstones, see the dates, calculate ages, construct stories of lives the likes of which I know nothing about. I wander. I look at the flowers and the sky and when I can no longer procrastinate, I am forced to face the reality of the polished gray markers belonging to my blood. The people, without whom, I wouldn’t even be standing here at all.

And in an instant, my mind flashed back to my uncle. How we, the family, took a stroll through the cemetery where my maternal family is buried, and being the history buff he is and full of knowledge about the town, my uncle filled us in and wandered about like I tend to do.

He’d die the next year...barely 50 something...and looking back on it, that peaceful stroll through the cemetery has been shaded and clouded and with hindsight feels like a foreshadowing that I couldn’t see at the time. 

The whole thing is just odd. Life is odd, death is odd, what we do with the dead is odd. I don’t want to be stuck in a box, I don’t want to be burned. There are times when I’m afraid because I’m alive, and other times that I’m afraid because of death. 

Once a person is gone, they exist only in the past. A part of history. A life and a soul and a story that ends on a quiet day in a summer sick cemetery. 

The warm breeze is too sweet, carrying the cloying scent of the cacophony of surrounding flowers. It’s eerily quiet save for the fluttering of leaves in the breeze. 

This...Pennsylvania...is home, and it isn’t. One day my parents will be buried here. One day it won’t be summer and I won’t be here on a holiday and I’ll be turning right on that road and the thought makes me want to vomit. No one is closer to my parents than I am. They’re my best friends. I’m an only child. They’re my world. And someday that world will break and I can already feel myself cracking beneath the weight of that inevitability. It makes me want to drive to them in the middle of the night and climb into bed with my mom and hold her tight. 

When her mom passed, she had her siblings, her husband, me, her child. Who would I lean on? My dog?

I have to go eventually, after the flowers have been tended to and the weeds pulled away, the SUV beckons. It calls me back to a media-inundated, agenda-filled, chaotic world that - even as it swallows you - laughs, because it knows how temporary you are. 

People don’t like to speak of death. Even I would rather focus on the afterlife as a Christian. But standing in the middle of a cemetery filled with stones that go back to the civil war...is like standing with your hands and cheek pressed against the cold metal door of another world. With baited breath you listen and strain, try to see, attempt to understand without going through...but you can’t.

I picture them on the other side... Grandma Helen, Grandpa Mike, Grandma Dorothy, Grandpa Bob, Sweetie I, Sweetie II, Biscuit, Uncle Dan, Marble.  And I’m not quite sure how people live thinking that this is all there is.

There’s a spot for me here too. A plot, close to my parents but with some strange man in between me and them. And I’m the one who, at 28, still insists on sitting right next to them on the airplane. 

I don’t want to ever use that plot. I don’t want them to use theirs either. They already have a headstone for heaven’s sake. I guess that’s what you do when you find out you have cancer, you buy your own headstone. The few times I’ve seen it...made me feel ill.  It’s glittery salmon surface glints in the summer sun, oblivious of how much I hate it. It winks in mockery at me, knowing that the bodies standing before alive will eventually spend more time beneath it.

Leaving the cemetery is like letting go of a breath that you didn’t know you were holding in. I’m grateful every time that metal mouth spits me back out onto the evenly asphaulted road into the town who’s cemetery population far exceeds that of the living population.