Death Becoming
It has been a long year of death. Death in our faces, from war, politics, and injustice, from technology extirpating still more of our human faculties, from a dubiously grounded belief afoot in whatever the future was, where fascism looms, not just because of Donald Trump.
Thus, the cemetery, where one may be instructed about death simply, where death is peaceful, and one may suck the marrow from it, or take a homeopathic picture of it without a camera, at the top of a low grade in the middle of its swelling acreage converging with other hills pressing against its access roads under four bare trees hearing squirrels above rustling the bark and chirping over the branches frozen in overwrought poses, then down the rise where one’s eyes pass magnetically over the armada of headstones facing away in their perfect stillness and anti-geometric harmony that would crowd the living appearing to wait not with any purpose but also not without intention. It is a strange contradiction.
Like a cenotaph of a whole army there is the tomb of Charles S. Goodwin, born August 16, 1841, died July 16, 1899, beneath him his wife, Kate W. Hobby, born May 12, 1835, died May 28, 1914. I can only imagine him as a Civil War veteran who went crazy from shell shock and died too soon.
A photographer approaches over a rise with a bulging camera apparatus, inching forward to take somber rounds of shots with obvious purpose, whereupon the hill that was just so vibrantly in focus fades instantly and the evergreens become vividly drawn: cedar, pine, and hemlock and their purplish bark painting gray.
Families of the dead occasionally wander from their scarcely parked cars at the iron entrance gates and converge among the newer grave sites and assume motionless positions like peristaliths. Old dirt roads unused, now overgrown with moss and short grass, pebbled and pine-coned, the occasional headstones like gigantic, stenciled neon road signs.
The stray, yesterday-bedraggled red rose beneath my feet at the edge of the perimeter of the short parapet wall on which I have been standing, between the edge of the wall and a thick gray shrub as tall as me. Its stubbed rectangle rises around a single broad headstone fixed at the head of a plot of an inchoate bog where dry brown leaves and pine needles lay in the crannies of the dirt with damp dismembered acorns. The rose has retained its warmth yet looks oddly iridescent with brown earth and soil under the sun-blotted gray.
The Donaldson family is underneath. At the bottom of the headstone, the name of Alice Delano Shearman. Born 1840, died 1931. H.F. Russell Howard, born 1842, died 1922. Methinks another Civil War veteran. Moving along, Acker, the Van Brunts: Cameron, 1831 to 1912, (veterans aplenty), Smith . . . MOTHER, FATHER, PETO Carolyn Wyckoff, born 1866, died 1967.
I think to meander among the undulations that heaved and descended and to walk the interior roads that encircled them where the newer headstones all with a silver-slate hue and squalid paths of dirt between them led to sparse, brilliant red holiday wreaths, the parched yellow moss, the dead pine needles and grass, but the memory of the year intrudes and the feeling of being at war with everything keeps me standing still unable to move. Only veterans come to mind.
Black squirrels abundantly crossed me on all of the descents of all the hills I climbed to glance at more headstones and the passage of time and avoid the access roads and the groundskeeping trucks that starkly grinded through them from time to time with rakes and shovels hanging off their beds. As I descended each hill another one leapt orthogonal. From the kitchen window thereafter, at home, another.
A stranger raked a flat embedded grave of the newer smaller sort of its organic detritus. Under a broad-brimmed hat, sweating, barely grinning, he said between strokes that he wanted to live the rest of his life and that he wanted that life to last, as he knew it would last, at least fifty more years (he was exactly fifty), but looking around at the sea of headstones, he was not at all sad that he would himself be among these tombs to become one more member of this ineffable sanctum among these purposeless intentions. It was something to look forward to. He did not want to be alive forever and could not imagine why anyone would want that fate. Nor would he want to live again. It was a strange contradiction, he said, to want to live out what one has but no more, and never again. Eternal return, he seemed to say, was for the blinkered who did not learn.