I visited a graveyard over the weekend. People told me it was a strange idea. Still, I followed the strangeness with sunflowers and red roses in hand to place atop unattended graves. I prayed for those below and their loved one’s still above, letting my eyes roam and catch.
In that field of Death, I found a quiet dichotomy, a brief apricity breaking through winter’s day.
The oldest graves were weathered and bowed by the changing seasons. Names had cracked and softened as if memory itself had thinned. Outlived by Time.
Then there were the newer graves. Flowers left once but never replaced. Stones beginning to tarnish and green. Grass sprouting unevenly. Here lingered the ache of faded love. Not forgotten but postponed. People moved on. Too busy, too far away. Life, relentlessly, does not stop for the mourning or the dead.
No one is coming anymore. And I wonder if they are knocking from inside their coffins.
Hello? Is anyone still there?
Will anyone remember me?
Will I be missed?
I wonder if they keep each other company. The dead and those they left living. I think of the graves of two lovers, laid side by side, some marked 10 years apart. I imagine fingers still interlocked beneath the earth or perhaps spirits dancing lightly above it. I wonder if they are together. I wonder if they are in Heaven. I hope to one day be buried next to a love that waits.
The simplest graves steal my breath the most: no names, only the words Mother and Father. There’s a universality and quiet reservation to these graves. I think of all mothers and fathers. My mother. My father. Of identities reduced to love given. Of lives that once filled rooms, now held in two muted stones.
And I saw graves that marked the young. Short dates. Lives ending mid-sentence, interrupted. Proof that Death doesn’t wait for meaning, or readiness, or plans; warning us to not let absence be what teaches us the worth of presence.
Because, before long, we will be the human that life slips, slips, slips out of collective memory.
And yet Mortality does not only grieve what is lost. It asks something of the living. It reminds us, with urgency, to pull those we love closer. To speak names while we can get an answer back. To show up not later but now. To tend the living with the same care we fear withholding from the dead. To remember before remembering is all that’s left.
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