Week 11Spring Week 11
For the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.
—George Eliot, Middlemarch
Rural children have graveyards instead of playgrounds. That was true when I was growing up, at least, visiting my grandparents in Lower Alabama. A graveyard is hallowed ground, but holiness means little to children. To them a cemetery is the ideal playspace—a grassy, tree-shaded park offering objects to climb on and jump from, dirt to dig in, things to throw at other children. (Magnolia seedpods were pressed into service as imaginary grenades by many a Southern boy during my Vietnam War–era childhood.) I was past childhood before I learned that I was supposed to be frightened in graveyards. Nothing has ever worried me about the places where the unknown dead lie beneath the soil.
It is coming on June now, the time last year when my father-in-law began to fail, and then failed very quickly, and I am stunned to be thinking again of death while all this life surrounds me. The hummingbirds are back from their long journey. The wild geraniums are blooming beside daisies covered with iridescent sweat bees. How can an irreplaceable life end in the midst of so many beginnings?
Often it happens this way, and I know it. I lost my own mother in less than twenty-four hours on another day in another June. The way death and life mingle and tangle, like the passion vine that twines among the blackberry canes in my pollinator garden—it’s always been like that. Or maybe it’s only death itself that comes as a shock, a giant rent in the tightly woven shroud we wear without noticing for all our days, no matter how many or how few we are given.
My father-in-law was born the same year as my father, but he survived Dad by close to two decades. He was my father-in-law for nearly as many years as my father was my father. Death at ninety-two should not be a surprise, but months later I can still be startled by reminders that my father-in-law is gone. At the store, I pause in the ice cream aisle before remembering that we no longer need to keep ice cream in the house to delight a loved one with so few delights left. I open the nest box to photograph the baby bluebirds, and then I remember that there is no reason to take pictures. For so long my father-in-law was too feeble to stand on tiptoe and peek into the box himself, but he always wanted to know about the baby birds.
There is a barrier island on the Georgia coast where Haywood’s family has buried their dead for generations. White settlers first altered that landscape more than four hundred years ago, but the island remained a wildlife sanctuary by default, sparsely populated and difficult to reach. Then came the first bridge.
More than a thousand acres of coastal marsh and maritime forest are still protected, but now a causeway funnels vacationers to and from the mainland, and the island is packed cheek by jowl with grand summer homes and high-rise condos, all booked months in advance. Those vacationers are the reason we could not lay my father-in-law’s ashes to rest beside my mother-in-law’s until months after his death: all the rental housing was taken.
Shaded by live oak trees draped with Spanish moss, the island graveyard is very different from the cemeteries of my childhood, but when we finally arrived with my father-in-law’s ashes, it brought the old places back to me just the same. I felt at home there, just as I feel at home in any quiet country churchyard with wind-rustled leaves and singing mockingbirds and tilting tombstones, the kind of cemetery where grass grows right on top of the graves. They remind me of the beloved place in Lower Alabama where I played hide-and-seek, where life and death come together in a way that isn’t possible in the burial grounds of more prosperous people. The peace of the dead, verdant and timeless, invites many animals to make their homes there. And children, poking about with far more patience than adults would believe, can easily find these secret homes.
If a rabbit’s nest is hidden next to the gray granite of a monument, the grass above it will be dry and shading to brown.
Look for the squirrel’s drey in the crook of the oak limb, and you will hear a faint rustling within the ball of brown leaves carefully tucked among the green ones.
The hole that opens up next to the chokecherry roots might be where a groundhog has gone to ground. Pretend to walk away and then creep back. A groundhog is too curious not to wonder where you’ve gone, and soon a wrinkling black nose and lively eyes will present themselves, if only for an instant.
There is no mistaking the location of the mockingbird’s nest in the dense holly hedge, though you see nothing of it, for the mockingbird will dive at you with murder in his eye if you venture near his family.
This place belongs not to the bones lying underground but to everything that death feeds—the soil, the beetles, the baby crows teetering on the edge of the high nest, urging themselves to fly on untested wings. Is this why I love graveyards so much, after all, and not the happy memories of hide-and-seek among the stones? Because they are so very filled with life? Within their rusted iron gates, life is protected in ways that the built world fails to provide almost everywhere else.
My husband’s parents are together again now, as near in death as they were in life for more than sixty years. Their headstones are paired in the way that I still think of them: side by side. After so many years with Haywood, I know their family stories as well as I know my own parents’. But beyond what is carved into the granite markers, almost nothing is known today about the people who lie beneath the oldest stones. A name, a set of dates—perhaps only one date, from a time when birth years weren’t recorded or even known. The rare bit of extra information might be the word Mother. Whose mother? Unless the names on nearby stones give a hint, those kinships are lost to time. Green, hallowed, belonging to human history. Belonging to the wild future. To our future, too.