19

A week later I sulked in the back seat, my head resting against the window. Another Sunday, another car ride in the wrong direction.

My mom made conversation with my grandfather in the front seat, telling him funny stories from a recent vacation she took with some friends. Even though he was my dad’s father and my parents were divorced, my mom and grandfather remained close. He lived in the town just north of us, and she saw him at least once a week. She’d stop by and sip Gatorade after she played tennis on the courts near his house; on evenings when she didn’t have plans she’d join him for a cognac, even though she normally didn’t drink.

I leaned over Donald’s car seat and tapped Joe, who was dozing off after working late the day before. “Do you think we can see the house today?”

With his eyes still closed, he mumbled, “It depends on how long this trip takes.”

So, no, we would not be going to Tarrytown today. A wave of nausea trickled through me, and I couldn’t tell if it was from morning sickness or from thinking about the house. It was still on the market. If we acted quickly, in a matter of weeks I could be supervising movers hauling our possessions from the storage shed into our new home. I could walk Donald down to the lake, let him run around on the dock by the Hula Hut, tell him that this was where we lived now . . . Another surge of nausea came up. I needed to stop thinking about this.

My mom spotted the unmarked entrance at the side of the rural highway and navigated the car down the gravel road that wound through a loose jumble of trees. The familiar sounds of rocks crunching under the tires, punctuated with the occasional screech of thorny branches down the side of the car, let me know we were almost there. Joe woke up from his catnap, and my grandfather picked up the bouquet of flowers that had been lying on the console. We approached the old chain-link fence and let ourselves in to the family cemetery.

Immediately I was greeted by familiar names. Of the hundreds of tombstones, dozens bore surnames from branches of my family tree. Bishop, my maiden name. Hurt, my grandfather’s mother’s maiden name. Hampton, Donnell, and Sybert, all names I’d heard mentioned as belonging to blood relatives. Some were proclaimed in large, clean text, modern gravestones that had been carved by machine. Others were eroded chunks of limestone with rough-hewn, uneven letters, chiseled out by poor farmers of bygone eras.

Just inside the gate stood a large pavilion, which held enough picnic tables to seat two hundred people. Behind that were the barbecue pits and a dilapidated outhouse. The setup was for the cemetery association’s annual potluck, called the Cemetery Homecoming. (Which always prompted my mom to remark, “Who comes home?!” She was raised in the Northeast, where evidently people didn’t hang out at cemeteries for fun.)

At the homecoming, a brief blessing was always offered under the pavilion’s tin roof, led by a Methodist or Baptist minister, as the smells of slow-cooked meat wafted over from the barbecue pits on the hot summer breeze. Folding tables were covered with corn casseroles and green beans glistening in bacon and butter sauce; bowls heaped with fruit salad stood next to rows of pies, cakes, cookies, and homemade peach cobblers with hand-rolled crusts. Everyone walked around and caught up with old friends and distant relatives, the sounds of chatter and laughter mixed with the smells of food.

But today the benches stood empty, the pavilion silent. The barbecue pits were cold and dark, even the ashes stripped clean by the fall winds. The dry grass crunched underfoot as Joe, my mom, and my grandfather made their way toward my grandmother’s grave. My grandfather would pull weeds and tidy the area around her headstone, then lay fresh flowers in front of it, as he had done almost every week for the past fifteen years.

I would join them in a minute, but first I wanted to take Donald on a stroll through the grounds. Per the longstanding family tradition, we stopped by the graves of great-grandmothers and great-great-grandmothers and people whose names I recognized from handwritten notes on the backs of old pictures. I carried Donald with me, telling him what I knew of each person, even though at just over a year old he was more interested in the birds than anything I was saying.

Toward the back of the grounds were the older graves, the ones from the settlers who first arrived by covered wagon in the mid-1800s. I’d wandered around these graves all my life, noting the unique first names like Miria, Alvia, and Eskalana. I passed the stone of J. T. Bentley, one I’d seen many times in my life. When I was a kid, I always pictured Mr. Bentley to be a proper old man, with a big belly, a top hat and a gleaming monocle (which showed that I wasn’t very familiar with the standard dress of nineteenth-century Texas farmers). I waved hello to Mr. Bentley and encouraged Donald to join me. As he giggled his own greeting to the old man, the engraving at the bottom of the stone caught my eye. I’d never seen it when the sun was at this angle, and for the first time dark shadows revealed its words:

Sweet remembrance of our darling babe

At the top, the name was proceeded by Miss. And the dates: August 1898—July 1900. J. T. Bentley was a little girl. And she was lowered into this grave a month before her second birthday.

I moved away from the grave as if repelled by a magnetic field, not even sure where I was headed. The sounds of Joe and my mom and grandfather talking faded away as I drifted toward the back of the cemetery, stopping just next to the fence that separated the trimmed grounds from wild land covered in cacti and mesquite. Next to a sprawling pecan tree, I saw another stone I recognized: Lona Harper. I had also assumed her to be an old woman, her white hair pulled back just over her neck in a neat bun. For the first time, I looked at the dates: 1882—1900. She was eighteen. And for the first time, I noticed that her tombstone was in a row of four. Next to her lay Quille Harper, 1898—1900. Then Charlie Harper, 1900—1900. My throat burned, and I wasn’t sure I even wanted to look at the last one. Dorcey Harper, 1884—1900. One family, probably distant relatives of mine, lost four children in the span of ten months.

My stomach churned to think of it. I turned to go somewhere else—anywhere where I wouldn’t have to look at those four tombstones—and encountered two identical tombstones, both with the same simple inscription: Murray baby. I stumbled over to a pecan tree and pressed my back against its cold, wide trunk. I held Donald close, his warm body moving against mine. In all the years that I’d strolled through these grounds, I never understood that I was walking through a cemetery full of children.

The knowledge hit me with the same freight-train force as my realization at The Creek when I was a child. What troubled me this time wasn’t the awareness of human mortality itself, but the awareness that it’s possible to lose it all. I suddenly understood with burning clarity that my entire sense of well-being was as fragile as an empty eggshell. My whole approach to life only worked because I happened to be a twenty-first-century American. If I were to be tossed into a time machine and thrown out into 1850, I’d find myself utterly unable to cope with the suffering and toil that my ancestors experienced. My current strategy of seeking happiness in comforts and amusements would be impotent against the knowledge that any year could be the year I’d lose a child.

I could see how a moment like this might lead a person to run off to a cave to spend the rest of his life meditating on divine truths. To realize that nothing—absolutely nothing—in this world will last is to realize that seeking the transcendent is the most important thing you could do with your life. But that was the problem. I had been seeking the transcendent. I’d read lots of books about God. I’d even prayed once or twice. And despite all that, I had gotten only silence from the cosmos in return. I may have made an academic decision that there was probably some kind of spiritual realm, but that offered little comfort now that I found myself surrounded by tombstones with kids’ names on them.

I wasn’t even positive that I believed in God, but I was already angry with him. So this is how it is? I railed in a prayer, once again half-suspecting that I was talking to myself. You sit there and do nothing, and we’re supposed to just take your word for it that you exist? You let all these terrible things happen to people, and then don’t even offer us any comfort in the face of it?

Maybe my plan of rooting my happiness in the material world was a great idea after all. Sure, it depended entirely on a steady flow of money and perfect health for Joe and me and everyone we loved. It meant blocking out entire categories of the human experience, living under a willful delusion that everything I enjoyed in this life would last. But at least it worked. It did bring me some peace, even if it was fleeting.

Donald began to squirm, so I set him down so that he could toddle over to my mom and Joe. I followed behind him, staring at the hard winter ground so that I’d avoid reading any more tombstones. When I met up with everyone else at my grandmother’s grave, Joe could tell something troubled me. He stood back where my mom and grandfather couldn’t see him and mouthed, “What’s wrong?”

I rolled my eyes and shook my head dismissively to indicate that I didn’t want to talk about it.

* * *

I forced a few smiles and threw out a few positive statements when we got home, but it wasn’t enough to convince Joe that nothing was wrong. He asked me if I needed anything to eat to help with morning sickness and offered to let me take a nap while he watched Donald. When none of that helped, he tenderly suggested that we look up the Tarrytown house on the realtor’s website.

We went into my office, where the page was already up on my screen from when I’d checked the status that morning. “That kitchen is surprisingly big,” he said from behind me. He was saying something else, but his voice sunk into the abyss of my dark mood.

He tapped me on the shoulder. “Did you hear me?”

“What? Sorry. No.”

“How many blocks away from the lake did you say it was?”

“Oh. I’m not sure. Maybe two.”

He made a few more upbeat remarks and then said something involving the words financing and investment. He was talking about getting the house. I instantly perked up at the news, only to have the happiness fall flat instantly, like a wave collapsing on itself. The trip to the cemetery seemed to have temporarily neutralized the house’s power over me. I’d probably get back to feeling excited about it. But right now, it seemed like just another thing that would one day be gone.

Joe was pointing at a picture of the patio when I pushed the chair back from my desk. “I need a sec,” I said. I didn’t wait for his reply before I left the room.

Like that day at Joe’s office, I found myself with few options for private spaces. Once again, I locked myself in a bathroom to pray. I slid down the wall and sat cross-legged on the floor next to the bathtub. I bowed my head, as much from exhaustion as from reverence, and said silently, Let’s try this again.

I apologized to God for speaking disrespectfully at the cemetery. I told him that I was lost in a no-man’s land, caught somewhere between seeing the hollowness of the things of this world, yet coming up with nothing every time I sought answers in the spiritual realm. It was good that I wasn’t speaking aloud, since trying to capture all my thoughts in words would have been like trying to capture a waterfall in teacups. My eyes filled with tears as I told God that he really, really needed to help me if I was ever going to find him. This time, instead of the usual jokes and caveats about how I was probably talking to myself, I just said, “Amen.”

* * *

I sat in the darkness with Donald, waiting for him to sleep. When his eyes fluttered closed for the last time, I lowered him into his crib. I flopped back into the green chair, not sure what I would do next. Among the shadows I noticed a fallen stack of Christian books by my feet. One had slid under the chair, and only a triangular edge poked out. I picked it up to see the familiar cover of Mere Christianity.

I was always loath to leave the room right after I put Donald down since it might wake him up, so I leaned closer to the nightlight and opened the book. I thumbed through the pages and re-read passages I’d bracketed, remembering the first time I encountered the starred sections. Then I came across a paragraph and sat up with a start:

When you come to know God, the initiative lies on His side. If He does not show Himself, nothing you can do will enable you to find Him.

I’d seen it before—I must have—but this time it caught my attention like a siren. I was shaken with a feeling that from the beginning of time, I had been destined to read this passage on this night at this moment. Lewis continued:

[God] shows much more of Himself to some people than to others—not because He has favourites, but because it is impossible for Him to show Himself to a man whose whole mind and character are in the wrong condition. Just as sunlight, though it has no favorites, cannot be reflected in a dusty mirror as clearly as in a clean one.

I whispered the last sentence, louder than I should have, not even worrying about whether it would wake Donald:

Yes. A feeling cascaded through me, my body physically relaxing as so many things that hadn’t made sense now fell into place. Yes. This was the key that I’d been missing.

No spiritual teachers ever said you could access divine truths without transforming yourself first. All my life I’d brushed by this idea that some lifestyles lead to enlightenment more than others. One thing that had always piqued my interest about Buddhism was the idea that you must go through rigorous practices in order to gain deep understanding. Buddha didn’t come up with the Four Noble Truths while rambling around the streets, throwing down some smack with his friends, eating and drinking whatever he wanted. It took days of fasting under the Bodhi Tree. Even when I was an atheist, everything I knew of the human experience confirmed that this was true. Maybe you could absorb data under any circumstances, but to attain wisdom you would have to be in the proper position, lifestyle-wise, and it probably wouldn’t be comfortable.

I read the excerpt again. I’d been approaching it all wrong.

I closed the book and set it in my lap. Everything within me said that this was it, that there was something about my approach to the question of God that had been blocking my ability to sense him. Something about my “mind and character” was in the wrong condition. Something about my life and my existence had to change. Now, I just needed to find out what it was.