Dead is Dead

Catherine Ault 1897-1984
David Marshall 1915-2009
Laura Tate 1968-2011
Mother, son, father, daughter, friend.

I spent quite a bit of time walking through a cemetery in Lincoln today. Why? Because it was there. It looked pretty from where I was sitting, and I had nothing better to do than to take a walk. Honestly, I still childishly hold my breath sometimes when I drive past cemeteries, but today I was drawn there. I didn’t intend on actually walking through there, but I found myself darting across six lanes of traffic to get to the right side of the street so I could visit the dead.

The sun was shining and the trees were flowering and the grass was green and the graves were decorated with fake bouquets. Before I knew it, I was walking through the grass, peering down at the beginning and ending points of all those lives. Dates and titles chiseled into stone forever. There’s something so falsely comforting about those headstones. They encompass a whole life, but in the most superficial way possible. I kept randomly tearing up at the death of total strangers. I sat on a bench and when I looked down, there were words engraved in it. I was on a headstone.

Part of me wished I had a blanket so I could throw it down and have a picnic, and the other part wanted to get the hell out of there before the ghosts started to ramble about. Because the sun was hot, I wandered to the sheltered area – a beautiful crypt. Smooth and solid and permanent. Name after name. And then the names started coming faster – the spaces were more compacted and I was struggling to figure out why they were so close together.

Cremated. Ashes to ashes. And I immediately thought back to A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius when he describes sticking his hand into his mother’s ashes and feeling the chunks and ash mixed together. Burned to ash and then stuck in a crypt until the crypt disintegrates with time. Please no. I want to be in the water with the eternal cycle of the sea, rock-hopping off the coast of Monterey where (if my family feels the need) people can “visit” me. Somehow the idea of an eternal resting place that consists of a six foot box is not terribly comforting.

It was a beautiful place, and those people create a remarkable historical landmark, but I don’t want to join the party. Let me go, and don’t think about me any more unless it’s for a fleeting moment when you get the first whiff of salt from the ocean air pounding into the shore.