The Cemetery House by Francesca Leader

CW: Deals with death/bereavement

I liked living by a cemetery.

It gave me an excuse to wisecrack about living on a “dead-end street” or having “the world’s quietest neighbors.”

More than the evergreen one-liners, I appreciated how park-like the cemetery was. The granite headstones demurred like flagstones in the vibrant expanses of grass, trees, and flowering plants. The minute you realized you were in a burial ground, a goose would splash-land perilously close to the Japanese bridge, or the hour would chime from the art deco carillon tower, and you’d forget.

By day, the cemetery teemed with semi-wild squirrels, songbirds, Canada geese, and Mallard ducks grown fat on human handouts; by night, it rustled with deer, foxes, raccoons, and coyotes who ventured in from the nearby forest preserve to forage on what the bolder animals left behind. A sign at the entrance read:

PROHIBITED:

Skateboarding, rollerblading,

or any other activities not in keeping with the

cemetery’s sacred purpose.

During our first days in the neighborhood, I balked at the sight of cyclists, joggers, and dog-walkers merrily making their way along the paths intended for bereaved visitors.

I soon got over it.

After all, the sign didn’t expressly forbid any kind of recreation, assuming it was less-than-desecrating. And hadn’t the Victorians used their cemeteries for picnics? Armed with this justification, I took my two small children over to explore. They ran around screaming, as children will; they may have knocked over a flower pot, defrocked a funereal rose or two. But a petal-plucking toddler surely was no worse than a defecating goose. I applied the Golden Rule: If I were lying there dead, would I want happy little feet trampling all over me? I would. The sight of my three-year-old daughter, barefoot in a green polka-dot dress that mirrored the lawns dappled in leaf shadow, was so lovely I had to take a picture of her there, splashing in the clean gush of water from a gardener’s faucet that had become, in her mind, the sink in a fairy’s kitchen. I couldn’t imagine a better symbol of life’s evanescence than this child, at play on the graves of those who once were children themselves.

When I had time to stroll unhurried, I tried to read each headstone in turn—I felt rude if I skipped one. My guilt about slighting the dead, like my ambivalence about my children stomping on them, came from vague convictions about doing-unto-others. If I were in my grave, wouldn’t I want the passerby at least to pause and read my name, to wonder what kind of person I’d been?

Here lay a woman with the cruel longevity of ninety-two years, next to her husband, who died long before her; beside them, a daughter, dead one year before her mother, and a son, who died before any of them, at only sixteen. And over here lay a man who died at fifty-three, buried next to his mother, who died the same year—no sign of the man’s father. No indication he ever married or built a family of his own. Was I calculating too much sorrow, or too little, in my equations of names and numbers? I sometimes stared at the hyphen between the dates of birth and death like a first-year Egyptologist stuck on a strange hieroglyph. For the initiates who’d known the deceased intimately, that cold brass line would unlock rich stores of memories. But where were these people? How many of them bothered to come, to turn the key now and then?

I felt better when I saw fresh cut flowers or potted plants on the headstones. Until I felt worse. Because it wasn’t enough.

When a person dies, 99.9% of who and what they were dies with them. Period. No matter how evocative the epitaph, it no more accurately represents the lost person than a consommé represents its distinct ingredients in their original state.

Couldn’t we try a bit harder, do a bit more, to show how much they mattered, and why?

I yearned for the condensed yet potent biographies on the table tombs of the oldest New England graveyards. One wonderful example I once saw in the Ancient Burying Ground in Hartford read:

“Mr. EBENEZER WATSON, Printer, who Died Sept 16th 1777, at 33/His heart was benevolent, he was kind to the distressed & an advocate of the injured/his life exhibited the Marks of an honest Man/Friendship to the rights of human nature/At his death which happened in the years of vigor & usefulness he received the distinguished Eulogy/the undissembled grief of a numerous Acquaintances.”

Few modern memorials reach this level of ardent detail—you might argue that’s what obituaries are for. But somehow it means less to pour your praise and longing into a Microsoft Word document than to carve it in stone, our most ancient imitation of permanence.

Contemporary children’s headstones are among the most elaborate in any cemetery. We have fewer children now, lose fewer children, and memorialize the ones we’ve lost much more, because we can’t help ourselves—though I doubt that spending more on our grief does anything to dispel it. On the contrary, I suspect the lavish memorial—perversely—demands more grieving to justify the expense.

Parents today cram a dead child’s headstone with pictures of things the child loved, protective symbols, emblems of shared happiness. The heartbreak is that these images come as close as they do to summing up the lost child, whose being, like her body, was so finite. A child hasn’t had time to gather the experiences and memories, the opinions and beliefs, the traits and complexities, that overflow the boundaries of knowing.

The memorials of adults who lived long, full lives can’t come close to capturing all that they were. Those of children can capture most of what they were, in fact—just as a jar of formaldehyde contains a fetus. But they can’t capture all that might have been. It’s the unfulfilled potential that aches in the bitter grass around children’s headstones. We don’t even have the comfort of imagining that they were so much more than this piece of rock in the ground because really, they weren’t. They didn’t have time to be.

I often lingered over a laser-embossed portrait in pink granite of a smiling, short-haired girl who died at less than ten years old—likely of cancer from the shorn-off look of her head. One day, there was a still-fresh strawberry shortcake in a rain-spotted plastic box beside her grave, and balloons attached to the box, because she recently had had a birthday. Or would have had one. After such a walk, I’d go home and overwhelm my children with hugs and hair-strokings and tell-me-what-you-did-todays until they bridled, and reclaimed their natural running, screaming state of freedom.

#

I’m certain that most of the world’s women experience far more death, by the age of forty-two, than I have. But just as beauty is in the eye of the beholder, I believe that trauma is in the mind of the traumatized. The deaths that came before and after my father’s left comparatively fleeting impressions, and my own brushes with death were just that—brushes; teasing black feathers on a scar at the back of my neck. My father’s death was the scar’s origin.

He died the day my daughter turned one year old.

Had this happened to someone else, Dad and I wouldn’t have been able to resist remarking on the irony, on the plethora of jokes that—after a decent passage of time—could be mined from it.

He died alone, on a secluded mountain road, jogging to stave off the very heart attack that got him. Nice try, I imagined death saying, like a hitman who leavens his grim work with wisecracks. I imagined a card sliding under the door in front of me, blood-red scrawl dripping over a balloon and flower pattern: Grandpa Says Happy Birthday.

Even at a time like this, I couldn’t turn off the joke machine. 

Dad raised me to find the punchline, and use it as a lifeline, in every challenging situation. He knew no other way.

I’ve theorized that Dad became this way through a combination of early trauma, and an innate aversion to phoniness. He told me almost nothing about his childhood. I know his mother drank too much, and died of cancer in her fifties. I know his father left her for another woman before Dad was grown. As much as family troubles, I think Dad’s reflexive joking evolved from growing up during cinema’s adolescence, when a studied artificiality marred even the greatest of films, and people on the street imitated art worse than it imitated them, walking and talking in stilted derivations of their favorite movie stars. If being serious meant acting like Lawrence Olivier or John Wayne, Dad wanted no part of it. So he spent many years as an irreverent ne’er-do-well without much aim in life beyond thumbing his nose at the establishment, until he’d honed his skills in his own, more honest forms of art—painting and songwriting—through which to channel the wellspring of truth in his soul. But even after decades as an artist, Dad maintained a mocking attitude toward himself and just about everything else.

 Thus, it was Dad’s own fault, really, if I couldn’t mourn him enough at first. My need to chase the comic resolution of every tragedy culminated, during his memorial service, in several fits of maniacal laughter at bad jokes perpetrated by some unhinged version of myself. I went so far as to quip to the gay neighbors about the worrying predations of the resurgent beaver population on their aspen grove across the pond from us. They graciously pretended not to notice.

I did cry, of course. Brutally. Until I looked, and felt, like someone had beaten me. I thought that was the worst of it. After a few months, I took stock of my improved affect and interest in life, and wrote myself a clean bill of mental health.

Then, two years later, I made the mistake of attending someone else’s funeral.

#

The builder who sold us the cemetery house unexpectedly lost his mother within a few weeks of closing on the property. He invited me to the service almost by accident, receiving the news while we were haggling over some defects in the house’s construction. When he said “My Mom died,” he sounded like he was still staring, as he spoke, into the chasm that had swallowed her. Talk of something as trivial as a sagging rain gutter became unthinkable. I cried with him on the phone. I told him about Dad. I suppose inviting me to the funeral was the only way he could acknowledge that I, too, knew what it felt like to lose a parent.

During the eulogy, while the builder and his family formed a study in wounded restraint beside the coffin, I struggled to keep the sobs inside my body, my face dissolving into a gelatinous mass of tears. The woman next to me touched my shoulder with concern, asked if I was OK. But I wasn’t crying for the person in the coffin. I was crying for Dad—resuming my unfinished mourning.

I left ashamed, feeling I’d made a scene.

#

In fairness to myself, I don’t even have a grave I can visit once a year. Dad was cremated.

His buddies from the “Capricorn Gang”—a crew of free-spirited Montana men all born in January—scattered most of his ashes over Upper Two Medicine Lake. If I want to visit the bulk of Dad’s mortal remains, I need to go there. To give my face to the wind in the presence of Mount Sinepa, seeing it not the way it is, but the way he painted it. To worship it the way he did, the only way he knew how: by taking it seriously.

I’m glad he died among people who understood him. The kind who knew, without a will, what he would’ve wanted. Had Dad lived long enough to really start falling apart, I know exactly what he would’ve done. Not because he talked about it, of course. I found it in the lyrics to one of his songs:

Way up on Kyiyo crag

Where the eagle soars

I think I’ve been here

A lifetime or two before

With the sun in the woods

Hangin’ low

I will go

To the top

Of this mountain

Wait for the Eagle to come home.

That’s how he’d have preferred to die—to climb a mountain, and never come down.

If nothing else, I’d say death let him have his second choice: sudden, clean, no time for regrets. The only thing he would’ve hated was the timing.

He wasn’t ready to leave me; I wasn’t ready to be left.

I lingered longer than I should have over the dark, sweet urge to follow him. But I wasn’t just someone’s daughter anymore. I also was someone’s mother. My life, the moment my first child entered it, became as much hers as mine.

#

Death’s come close to me twice since I became a parent. In 2011, I was hospitalized after a fainting spell, underwent a catheter ablation to repair a heart defect, and ended up with a blood clot in my left lung—a classic fix one thing and break another scenario.

Five days post-op, it felt like someone had dropped an anvil on my chest.

I tried to sleep it off, but after a few ragged half-conscious hours, I woke my husband and told him to drive me to the ER, not at all sure we’d make it there in time.

It turned out that hormonal birth control plus five days in a hospital bed minus blood thinners (which I refused, due to concerns about uncontrolled bleeding from a previous procedure) equaled a perfect storm of risk factors. I survived, the doctors told me, because I was young and strong. I was the only un-grayed head in the recovery ward where they monitored me for one week after my treatment. I watched endless reruns of House (which I’ll never watch again), ruminating on all the myriad ways to get sick and die.

The episode wasn’t a wholly unpleasant one: the isolation of my hospital room gave me more time to think than I’d had in years; the visits with my husband and children had all the sweetness of clandestine rendezvous.

In 2014, there was another near-death experience, more mental than actual, but I count it, because I spent half an hour believing, in earnest, that I was going to die.

I was five months pregnant with my third child, returning from a visit to Turkey. Over Iceland, the plane began to porpoise so violently that I knew the pilot must’ve lost control. I cried so hard I almost vomited. I cried because my unborn baby would never be born, because I’d never see my children’s faces again, and because I foresaw the hardship and doubt they’d battle in the years ahead, trying to grow up with a hissing black void at their feet where the nourishing soil of Mother should’ve been.

The man in the seat next to me kept glancing over nervously, but also kept one eye fixed to the video on his laptop screen. Did he really want to spend his last moments engrossed in some inane fiction? Or did he know something I didn’t? Perhaps he did, because as we cleared the unstable atmosphere of the volcanic winter island, Loki reluctantly released his grip on our plane. Before long, the flight attendants wheeled out the drink carts with carefree smiles. But when we landed in New York, the passengers clapped and cheered. I’m sure everyone who got off that plane—with the possible exception of laptop guy—felt reborn.

I believe I needed those close encounters with death the way many people need to go to church. In fact, I believe that even those who do go to church—or mosque, or temple, or shrine—need such experiences.

Because each close call reminds us that our lives are a series of close calls.

A walk in the cemetery does much the same thing.

Take a walk in any cemetery, anywhere, and you’ll find your parents, your spouse, your children, yourself.

#

The cemetery house is now part of our past, several houses back in the timeline. I remember the place we moved right after that house, a four-level townhome in a mushroom crop of townhomes; we got our exercise schlepping up and down stairs rather than chasing geese among the headstones. There was a small, triangular plot of graves wedged between our development and an extended-stay hotel on a busy street. A metal chain-link fence cut it off from the world; the gate was padlocked—like a storage facility. Short of breaking the law, I’m not sure how anyone got in to visit. Many of the graves had artificial flowers, but nothing fresh or seasonal.

Our old cemetery had roses on Mother’s Day, flags on Veterans’ Day, and holly at Christmas. Cars, bikes, and strollers rolled through every day on the wide, welcoming paths.  Visitors lay flowers on the graves, and threw bread to the geese. The elderly rested; children frolicked. It always seemed to me that whoever locked up that cemetery down the street had lost sight of the most important thing about burying the dead: we don’t do it for them.

I think of Dad every day. I grieve, knowing I’ll grieve again tomorrow. But I don’t fear the grief. It serves to remind me that gratitude—whether or not I know where to direct it—is the only sustainable response to being alive.

*

The Story Behind the Story:

The idea for this piece arose probably 10 years ago, when my father’s death as well as my own health crises were still fresh experiences. I was trying to process my pain through writing, and also liked the idea of writing about death with the cemetery near my house as an anchoring point. The piece didn’t feel right, in part because I didn’t yet have objectivity about the experiences it described, but also because I didn’t have the craft skills to know how to fix it. I ended up letting the piece sit until around 2020, when I picked it up again and started cutting. There’s nothing harder than cutting words that speak of your own pain, but I found I finally was able to do it.

“The Cemetery House” was first published in Barren Magazine.

Header Photo by Kristine Cinate on Unsplash