no dominion

Just for a second, I saw them, as if in a child's picture book or one of those Anne Geddes baby-as-cauliflower-type photo montages.  Legion, the lot of them.  Some in crisp black and white, Rogers and Nancys with white, salt-crusted headstones, all little lambs and angels.  Others were more Technicolour, like the garish, blurry snapshots of my own childhood...a Jason, a Robin, a "beloved baby boy".  One, much newer, I recognized; the newborn girl with the hole in her heart, the first baby I ever knew who died.  Across the sweeping hill in the older part of the cemetery I could see their compatriots...almost too many to count, dim and sepia, names obscured or hopelessly ancient, buried with young mothers or the siblings who followed in a series like stepping stones of sorrow.  For a second in the peace of the cemetery, I could see them all, each one a story, a whole life anticipated, condensed to a few dates and letters on a stone.  Each one a silent, plaintive testament to thethreshold we living things must traverse...into life, some way or another, and out.  For too many, the challenge insurmountable, the dates identical, cut short.

I do not go to the cemetery very often.  My own child is not there...we cremated him, still hoard the ashes in our bedroom with ambivalence, unsure of how to stage a letting go.  But I have known this place since my earliest years, when the grandmother whose bones lie here was alive and the guardian of the family stones, and I her charge, her companion in the regular pilgrimages of caregiving.  I fetched water from the old pump and dragged it to black, faded headstones of people even she barely remembered, fetched again and helped water the graves of her husband and brother and parents, all gone before I'd been born.  I listened and learned my family history in this place. 

While she weeded, though, I ran wild...and it was the childrens' graves that fascinated me.  I spun stories to myself about the children they represented, these names on the small stones.  I knew them, could have led a tour around the cemetery from Douglas to "wee Elmer" - though I was agog at the idea that an infant had ever been named Elmer - through the ones whose names were already crumbled away.  Rapt with the morbidity of childhood, I wondered about them all, spoke to them, flitted amongst them w eekly through years of summer afternoons while my grandmother tended the geraniums of people I'd never meet.

I drove through the cemetery on a whim, Friday, nearby and suddenly guilty because my grandmother has no geraniums to mark her place, now.  I stopped, and stood by her grave, staring at her name on the headstone, assessing...her name will be one of my daughter's names when this child crosses the threshold into whatever awaits.  I spoke to her, then, my grandmother, though I do not believe she's really there...spoke with love and awkwardness mixed, like a shy suitor.  I speak to Finn the same way, self-conscious; I do better listening for the dead than trying to hold up my end of the conversation.  Then I sat down by my grandmother's grave and drifted for a minute, feeling closer to her in calling up memories of her hands in the soil beside me.

That's when I saw them, all the babies.  My eyes caught on the first stone, three rows back and a few over, where it always was. It is a baby's stone, one where the dates, like Finn's, are only a day apart.   Nearly sixty years old now, that story, that loss.  I realized that the parents of that child are probably long dead themselves now, gone beyond whatever remained of their sorrow to the same side of the threshold as the baby they marked with a sandstone lamb.  And I looked to the left, where I knew the next stone would be, and suddenly for that one moment I felt like I could see them all, every one of them laid here, too small or too sick or just gone for no reason anyone will ever know.  They were neither beautiful angels nor objects of sorrow, of absence...just babies and children, real for a moment.  And time, finally, seemed to have made peace with them.

I wonder if, sixty years from now, when we here are mostly just memory, if the sting of our stories will go with us...if the words we leave here will bear witness only to love, to moments lived?

I long for that.

Comments

[Lori]

Beautiful.

Sometimes I feel I have already taken the sting of my story with me. It has been absorbed within my being, protected within my heart, and no longer able to wound anyone else with its sadness.

[Tara-Lynn]

This is a beautiful post, and so well written. I could really visualize you sitting there. Thanks for sharing.

[George]

Beautifully expressed Bon.

[Carly]

Dear Bon,

That was possibly the most beautiful piece of writing I have ever read.

Thank You,

Carly x

[Vicki]

That was beautiful. I visit the cemetary where my brother is buried beside my Papaw and I too see the children's markers. It is a sad thing to have to bury a child. No one should ever know that pain. No one should ever have to know the pain of losing a child either.

I hope you find peace when you sit there beside her headstone because she is there with you, if only in spirit, she's there. And she's proud of you. Your little boy is proud of you, too.

[CLC]

Beautiful post Bon. I often think about who will remember my child if I do not since I feel like I must be the only one who thinks about her now. I can only assume that she will be forgotten once I am gone. That doesn't sadden me as much as you would think, because aren't all of the dead eventually forgotten, at least in the individual sense?

[janis]

Oh Bon, this is just beautiful. took my breath away..

I recently read an essay written by a woman who visited the grave of her Geisha teacher in Japan. In Japan you leave behind a "calling card" of sorts at the grave. Your name on a wooden stick. She knew that only a friend of her Geisha teacher had been visiting... even though her teacher had so many friends in her life. As she poured water over the headstone, a butterfly came by. A breeze blew and she saw the butterfly cling on, not wanting to be blown away. The butterfly turned to look at her. Flew away and then came back again. She was sure the butterfly was her teacher's soul, coming to visit with her. Of course, give that to a scientist and he will just crush everything down to coincidence. But she was sure.

I believe the spirits and souls we love are always around us.
(When I was young, my grandma always say never hurt a moth that fly into your house; they are the dead ones coming back for a visit.)

[kate]

This was so lovely.. and Janis, your comment was, too.

I feel so peaceful in cemetaries.. especially the old ones that no one ever visits anymore. I don't know why. I could sit there for hours and just 'be'... somehow it solidifies the point for me that they (the lost people) are not there.. that they're somewhere else (who knows where). That this is a place we've constructed to cope with being left behind.

[julia]

I always check in on the babies who died since A in our little baby section of the cemetery. I also sometimes check on the babies from years before. It gives me a small measure of comfort to see new mementos left at the graves from twenty and thirty years ago.
We are also just now getting ready to order A's permanent marker-- it took us this long to find the words...

[Katherine]

I can't get my head around graveyards. Some cemeteries are awkward places to me,the new ones, cement caps and people lined up in rows, as artificial to my way of thought as the mummies we saw in the British Museum, a sharp distinction between life and death, here and there. Preserved just so you could dig it up and put it under glass. Embalming seems repugnant, holding someone here because we can. But old cemeteries or catacombs, the ones with family tombs, where you jumbled bones around to make room for the new, mixing together, those always seemed better to me. We had Aeryn cremated because I couldn't have sorted out a way to say goodbye to her in a ritual style yet, only now am I starting to feel like there should be a funeral, now, when people around me seem as though they might not care about having one anymore. But now, I am starting to need some ritual, some way to include Aeryn and my selkie in life, even if it's only from time to time; I'm not done hurting, but I think at least for right now I am done trying to hold too tight or push things away.

[Mandy]

Our town has a cemetary split by a major road, with many headstones that can be read while driving by. I've been wanting to do...something about the children's section. As crazy as it sounds, this one section seems too close to the traffic, no fence or border to protect it. It seems silly, I know, but I think it each time I drive by.

My daughter usually notices that portion of the cemetary as well, with its balloons and toy mememntos.

I just try to take comfort in how small a space it is.

[tash]

This is such a beautiful post Bon. As a historian I've also had a fascination with cemeteries, but mostly of the mystery behind the dates -- around here, I've seen scores of children with dates in the 1790s, and remember that there was a yellow fever outbreak then. Now I wonder about the mystery, and the family, and the baby, and the grief. Always with the grief.

Maddy's remains are still here in the family room, and I'm also not sure exactly what the permanent resting place will be.