Stone Gardens

I love cemeteries. They are old and reverent and beautiful places, and the residents are quiet and accommodating. I enjoy sitting on the benches placed by families, and wandering among the monuments and reading the names and dates. I calculate how old these people were when they died. I think about what was happening in the world when they were born; what great historical events they witnessed; what changed during the course of their life.

These places are astonishing to me. They are grand displays of our deepest fears. They are a last grasp to keep our loved ones with us. They are our mortal vulnerability etched in stone. They are a common belief that is so strong, clear and agreed, that we reserve great plots of land for it and build walls and rules around it. They are a place to go back to, over and over again to worship death.

Cemeteries are sanctuaries of loss. They are sprawling temples of mourning, because we believe that mourning more, mourning longer, and mourning bigger means we loved more; we loved bigger. Even if there is some truth to this, the object of our love is gone. Who is the audience for the show?

I was raised to never step on a grave as a sign of respect. Of course, the bodies that were placed here will never know if I step on the ground above them, and I can't imagine that they care. But I do. I get angry when I see tourists in famous cemeteries walking across the graves and I want to slap them and ask “Is that how you were raised?” I participate in the fantasy of permanence.

It’s so strange that we would try to preserve the body of our loved one, that we would seal it in an elaborate container with silk padding and try to stop what is natural, what is necessary, what cannot be stopped. We selfishly try to keep the body here with us, rather than gracefully and lovingly facilitating it's return. It’s strange to me that we would seize a plot of land, even a tiny one, and claim that no one else can ever use this ground for anything other than worshiping this single student who finished class and left the room decades or centuries before. “This body is special. This one must be preserved forever.” Grave gardens.

A cemetery is an expression of love and loss by those of us left behind. Some remaining families need to show their wealth and social status and a grave garden is a prime opportunity for that. For some, it's a show of piety and a summoning of their God. The plots and statues are arranged in perfect rows. Many families construct fences, or low cement barriers, or mausoleums to separate their loved ones from other. It's all designed and constructed by the living, to serve the living, to serve our beliefs about ourselves. In a way it's the living world's fantasy of death.

I've always wondered what a cemetery would look like if designed by the ones who have died. What if they could slip us a drawing or instructions from the other side that told us what they actually need from us now that they have dropped their bodies; how THEY want us to treat their remains and their memories. Would cemeteries even exist?

The living come to these beautiful grave gardens searching. Some of us find this place profane - an affront to the knowing that the spirit we knew cannot die, cannot be contained in one tiny body-sized space. Some of us find this place divine - a temple to the greatest loss we will suffer in our lifetime and we preserve it as sacred and holy. We who are still stitching the pieces together come here to cry, to pray, to tell stories, to listen, to remember, to rewrite memories more to our liking. No matter what the living person may need from these beautifully designed temples, it is here, waiting for us. The patient residents hold space for our needs with limitless wisdom. They are generous with stillness and solace. They show no judgement. They hold all the dreams and beliefs and mourning that the living bring.

We are terrified that we will not be able to hold onto someone when their physical form has gone. How will I hold onto them? How will they enter our thoughts, our conversations, our day if they are not standing there with us? So we transfer the memory of that physical form to another physical form; something that is solid and will not walk away, or lay in a bed and wither away. We transfer that physical form to something we can touch, and control, and keep an eye on, something that is solid that we know will always be there. It breaks my heart that we reduce the soul of those powerful ancestors that fought wars and loved and built homes in order to cram them into a slab of polished rock. It's devastating that we think the entire life and spirit of a woman who fought society itself to live the life her mind and soul demanded, could be condensed down to a stone statue.

I pray that I never drag a hat around with me from house to house because it is the last remnant of my brilliant, hell-raising, trickster grandfather. I pray that I never reduce my radiant and powerfully independent mother to a necklace that I pull out and look at with growing infrequency. It's insulting to the souls they really were - generous, vast, vulnerable, creative, loving, seeking. Any physical object is just too small to hold our gone beloveds. I want to find them in every tree and in the air itself. I want to hear them in my own words. I want to feel them in me whenever I need to feel them. I want to be surprised by a sudden memory of my time in their warmth and smile.

On many Sundays after church when I was young, the old folk in my family would ask that we stop by the cemetery to visit Grandaddy or a beloved Aunt. We would drive up the dirt road past the Baptist church and park under the massive pine trees and wander slowly out to the family plot. We would stand in the blistering Texas sun and look down at the stones, waiting for the oldest among us to break the silence. Then my grandmother or great uncle would finally tell us something about that person's life, or their personality, or something outlandish they did, and we would nod, or laugh to show we were listening. That would open the gate for the flow of gentle, pensive memories we had all heard a hundred times before. On a rare occasion, a new story would come up, or we would veer off track to another relative and the kids would hear memories that were new to them.

I am grateful for the magic of the stones in that humble country cemetery in east Texas. They taught me how to tell stories. They taught me to be a reverent witness. They taught me what my people value. They bound me up tightly to my elders. They deepened my knowing of who I am. They drew out the treasured memories of my people, edited by time and carefully wrapped in the soft velvet of loss, and handed them to me so that they live in me today.

In these places, the grand white monuments of the wealthy and powerful, and the grown-over flat markers of the “less than” people all end up the same - cracking, hosting beautiful quilts of plants, sinking under their own weight, the letters fading away from the battering of a million drops of rain. I love that equality finally circles back in the end. I love that families will always try to conquer the dimming of collective memory. I love that the universe keeps moving forward, whether we agree to its terms or not. I actually like the idea that at some point, we all get to move on and turn it all over to the next world of dreamers.

Photos:

Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah, Georgia

Lafayette Cemetery No. 1 in New Orleans, Louisiana.