Among the dead

I’ve always liked cemeteries. I am more comfortable with death than most people I know, and I find cemeteries comforting in the way that ruins of great empires are comforting: All things pass.

In my walk through East View Cemetery, the oldest grave I saw was someone who’d died in 1907, and the newest was 2023. More than a century of people who lived through incredible tumult of wars, civil society upheavals, victory in stability as well as in change.

And all of them are now removed from everything. Some of them surviving in memories of the living, but others whose graves haven’t been visited in a very long time.

There were so many infants and young children. They died before they owned anything or owed anyone, before they had to dispossess themselves.

There were young men who died in their early 20s in World War II.

I saw the graves of two brothers who both died, a tribute to the sacrifices made tens of thousands of times over.

I wanted to know what they’d looked like, thinking of how handsome my own dad was when he was in the war.

There were people whose only title was “wife” or “mother,” the word carrying so much meaning in who it leaves behind. Why not also “sister”?

Amidst all the graves was the persistence of life. Even in February – flowers, bees, a hawk.

Ancient trees whose bark carried furrows as deep as the sorrow all around them.

So many of the graves carried the inscription “At rest”. All resting at my feet in the knowledge of impermanence and constant renewal.