MY GOOD FRIEND HAS a last name everyone in Baltimore knows: the same as a historic neighborhood and its main thoroughfare. In 1839, his great-great-grandfather was one of the investors in the city’s first public cemetery—Green Mount, a classic name for a classic burial ground in the Victorian “rural garden” style. When you drive though the brick arch of the Gothic guardhouse, you could be traveling through time as well as space, from a rundown urban block in the twenty-first century to a misty moor in times gone by.
It could have been Jared Leto playing the bearded watchman. He put down the book he was reading—E. M. Cioran—to sign us in and give us a map. Down Oliver’s Walk, we found the spot where my friend and his husband will someday lie. Beside his mother and father, near generals, mayors, and governors, among happy and unhappy wives and pioneer lesbians. On the back of my friend’s mother’s tombstone she requested a list of all ten of her children’s names. As much as any Civil War battle, an achievement of note.
In winter, Green Mount offers a panorama of quietly graying neighborhoods, splashed here and there with bright-colored murals and graffiti. In warmer months, the sycamore, locust, oak, and maple fill in with leaves; cardinals and ravens arrive to build their nests. Occasionally birdwatchers have seen a falcon or owl, probably as surprised to find this little utopia as I was. According to the philosopher-watchman, there are seventy-seven thousand dead at Green Mount; new arrivals are down to about ten per year. One day my friend will be among them, joining his ancestors in the earth of their shared hometown, his love at his side.
For me, there is a lidded ceramic vase waiting on a small table in the corner of my living room, tucked behind two similar urns and an ice bucket. The urns contain the ashes of my first husband (The Skater) and our stillborn son. My mother was supposed to have the third, but while it was on order, she was temporarily stored in the silver ice bucket she and my father won for the 1965 Husband and Wife tournament at Hollywood Golf Club, and actually, that was just right. My father’s ashes were stolen from the back of a jewelry drawer by a misguided robber in the 1990s.
As my friend said that day at Green Mount, I don’t mind the thought of joining them. But no time soon.