I push open the cemetery’s metal gate. The three vertical bars are decorated with two oversize oak leaves made of copper. A sign says it’s a designated historic site.
This cemetery is more hilly than the other one. The roads are unpaved, just two tracks of gravel. Instead of well-manicured grass, there are only weeds and wildflowers.
Ahead, the road splits in two. The section on the right holds only a few graves and slopes gently to a wooden fence.
Us kids used to ride our sleds down that hill. This is a real memory from when I was six or seven, not a dream or my imagination. My grandma leaning over to give me a push. Me laughing and gasping, joy and fear mixed together, my fingers curled tight around the wooden edge of the sled, the snow only inches from my face. Running back to her, shouting, “Again! Again!”
Now the same ground is being mowed by an old man wearing sunglasses and a battered straw cowboy hat. He raises a leather-gloved hand from the tractor’s steering wheel. I return the gesture.
No wonder my grandmother chose this place for my mom instead of the sterile flat grass where my father is buried. This jumble of weathered stones of all shapes and sizes makes the other one look as appealing as a filing cabinet.
I don’t remember where my mom’s grave is, so I let my feet choose which way to walk, which turns out to be up the hill toward a big stucco building with stained-glass windows. Along the way, I pause to read gravestones. Now that I’m here, I’m in no hurry to be confronted with the chiseled words that will permanently underline the truth.
One small white marble marker says just the word Baby and the dates of its birth and death, which are the same: May 7, 1904. At one point, a lamb must have decorated the top, but the head’s been broken off.
The air is filled with the trills and chirps of birds, punctuated with the occasional caw of a blue jay. And then I hear the sad, distinctive call of a mourning dove rise and fall: ooooh, ooh, ooh, ooh. When I was a kid, I thought it was morning, not mourning, but then Grandma set me straight, explaining what the word meant.
Mourning. It’s such an old-fashioned word, but so is grief. Both as heavy and solid as tombstones.
Each of these stones marks a person who was loved and missed. How many tears has this ground soaked up? Four children from the same family all died in July 1899. In 1936, a young woman died the same day as her newborn son. Here’s Silas Hawk, who was twenty-one—the same age as my dad—when he died in 1919. Did he have a sweetheart? A child?
A few plots are surrounded by black wrought-iron fences complete with little gates. Small, plain gravestones stand next to those with elaborately carved birds and flowers, crowns and candles, doves and angels. One concrete monument is shaped like a tree shading a bench, and I maneuver closer to see the inscription. The weeds are as high as my ankle, and my foot slips into a small, crumbling hole. With a muffled cry, I yank it out. I know it’s some animal’s burrow, that no bony hand is going to come reaching out. That I can’t thrust my arm down to touch moldering flesh. I know that.
This part of the cemetery hasn’t yet been visited by the man with the tractor. Scattered among the graves are blue bachelor’s buttons, orange poppies, white clumps of yarrow, yellow buttercups. In my head, I hear Grandma’s voice as she names the wildflowers. Others are just plain weeds, full of thorns and stickers, not worthy of being remembered by name.
My eye is drawn by a flash of orange. It’s not a spectacular wildflower but an unopened bag of Cheetos. I know even before I get close enough to see that the marker belongs to my mom. Memories flood me, of how I would visit with already-drooping flowers picked from Grandma’s yard. Sometimes my mother’s friends had been there before us, and we would find a full bottle of beer or another offering. Once it was a rhinestone tiara, which Grandma allowed me to wear home.
Who brought the Cheetos? Who still remembers she liked them? I’ve read that Chinese people sometimes burn play paper money, food, and clothing at the graves of their loved ones, believing the essence of the needed thing wafts to the afterlife.
I stand in front of the tombstones for my mother and my grandmother. They are nearly identical, even though they died four years apart.
Mommy, I am standing on your bones. Under my feet, she lies in a slowly rotting casket, with all the weight of the earth on her.
A cry is torn from my throat. Mommy, mommy, mommy, and then I’m on the dry, stony ground, pricker bushes scratching my face, but I don’t care, tears hot on my cheeks. My words are jumbled, some in my head and some torn from my mouth. Why did you have to leave me, why did they take you from me, why did they take everything, I miss you, I wish you were here, I love you, I’m so sorry I couldn’t save you.
I cry for a long time, at first so hard I can’t catch my breath, and then slower and softer. Until finally I’m cried out, silent, stretched flat on her grave. My arms spread as if they might tunnel through the earth and pull her to me, reclaim her bones and put flesh on them.
And then I’m rewarded. No, I don’t hear her voice in my ear. I don’t feel her soft touch on my back. What I’m given is a memory. Of sitting on her lap and turning the pages of a book. “‘Brown bear, brown bear what do you see?’” Her cheek against mine and her soft breath in my ear and her smell, a certain sweet smell, in my nose.
And for a moment I know without question I was loved.
But that doesn’t make it any better. Because I was loved and someone took that from me. I cry again, more softly, the anger and rage bleeding away, leaving behind only a grief like a stone. I sleep then, without meaning to.
And wake to a rough hand on my shoulder.