A Different Type of Peace
47: On Remembrance and Grief
Hi friends!
Firstly, I want to thank my newest paid subscriber, M.B., for their patronage! I’m honored and humbled.
This week, I’ll share a unique friends’ outing and some of my insights…
Our friendship is a slow river that courses down past mossy banks and smooth stones on its way to nowhere in particular. The best friends I have are the one who I say “forgive me” and Amy does just that: she forgives me my absence.
It’s been hard to get together. It’s a mix of missed connections for one reason or another but three years have passed swiftly. This time, we opted out of the Manhattan buzz and instead, Amy took me time traveling in a cemetery.
Headstones dotted grassy knolls on a breezy Monday afternoon. It was far from spooky or morose, but peaceful. My friend’s face lit up as she panned an outstretched hand over the landscape, pointing toward the sections she’d been to and what she wished to find. Amy had been fulfilling requests for Find A Grave1 during the course of studying genealogy and found the work rewarding. Over time, she’d gotten to know a lot about cemeteries, their layouts, and history. But there was more to discover each time, more to learn about those buried, and the people who tended the land.
We strolled past whole families, marked simply by initials, epitaphs, or weather worn slabs with pebbled surfaces, the interred’s names gone forever. There were all shapes and sizes of headstones with styles typical of a time period or one that was styled after slender stones found in the UK. They varied from simple, block-like stones for babies to elaborate Celtic crosses, life size statues, and obelisks. The material was mostly marble which was used among the earliest graves cast in the early 1800s. There was the occasional slate and the rare brownstone, both of which suffered from flaking and chipping over time. The best material was granite and represented the majority of stones among more recent sites.
We soon sat down in a shaded spot for lunch and I spread my beach towel in front of some worn headstones. I opened my picnic basket with tuna salad, potato bread slider buns, Cheetos, cookies, and lemonade. We sat and chatted more, her apologizing for rambling, and me happy to listen. In between the noise of a lawnmower and lament of the mosquito population, I sat in a comfortable stillness, looking and wondering.
There seemed a kindness in choosing a spot on a hill for a decedent’s final rest. Century-old tree roots wound down over rocks and small slopes, while branches reached wide and shaded spots underneath. Wind threaded through paths lined with stones and grass blades and it was a peaceful, reverent quiet. Suddenly I realized why I didn’t like cemeteries or surrendering to grief. I have spent many years holding back and intellectualizing emotion instead of feeling it. Allowing yourself to feel when it has served you to be stoic is a difficult transition. A cemetery is a reminder of what we cannot ignore.
We say a lot about the dead and often lie. Once dispensed of the mortal coil, it hardly seems useful to pick apart the bad parts. The balance of one’s life seems a rightful summation. You wouldn’t know it from the painstaking stained glass of mausoleums though. It’s hard to believe any stain to humanity remains in this place. But then there are the outpourings of love that reveal the pain of loss and what still lingers.
One mournful part is that once family dies or moves away, monuments crumble, no matter how cherished. We are left to ask what happens to their gravesite. It is forgotten. Then when someone from far away gets curious about an ancestor, that’s where Amy comes in to make sure they’re remembered.
She is more than her tragic story, more than a gravesite where her youngest, 10 years old at the time, would forever grieve as a motherless child. She was warmth and kindness… I hope [my daughter] can find the words to capture the soul of a person, to lift them off a stark page, off a dissection table, and make them real.
Grief is generational. My grandmother died in 1984 and two of her grandchildren, my cousin and I, were born into grief.
We cannot know the woman she was, only imagine her from photos, from her children’s tears of tribute, from descriptions of her smell, her hands, her life. What happens though is that some of us make room for these memories, which are embedded deep and conducted through who we are and how we work.
For me, my grandmother appears as snippets in my short fiction as a presence with no name. She is in the way I love, the way I tuck my son close to me unconsciously to catch each other’s scents. She’s in the way I linger in my garden a moment too long before work. Above is an excerpt from the first piece I ever wrote about her. I shared it at a salon and after reading it, turned off my camera and cried through the entire critique. I didn’t know I could feel so strongly slipping into the voice of my mother, bookended by impossible sadness and hope.
My grandmother’s tomb sits on family land and is covered in smooth, white tile. I have seen it every time I visit our home in Jamaica and know her epitaph by heart.
I feel an emotional pull when I pass cemeteries now, looking fondly on the rising monuments to the dead. I want to learn more about the craftspeople who carved tributes and of perhaps the people they honored. Those fields are filled with stories, of your families, and of mine.
It’s a deep topic, so feel free to comment on the silly or funny things you remember about the departed so we can think of them fondly too. Grief doesn’t just belong in the realm of sadness, but of joy too.
What’s next?
Subscriber podcast episode (fiction)
Might go for something silly or light-hearted
What would you like to see from The FLARE?
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https://www.findagrave.com
This is beautiful.
Grief has been a pretty central theme in my life, but not the death of loved ones. Those have stayed more or less peripheral. It’s a strange thing and I don’t much look forward to it, but grief and I have our familiar rhythms.
When I die I want a natural burial! Explored different approaches to death a few years back, and was captivated by natural burial grounds and aghast at the energy and money poured into conventional funerals, burials, and especially cremation. Not bashing those who make that choice, but I wanna do something different.