The graveyard walk

The Cemetery Entrance (Caspar David Friedrich, 1825)

About once a week, I walk through an old graveyard near my house.

The graveyard is enclosed by a tall wrought iron fence, one with spiked spirals at the tops that twist upwards, just like you see in the movies. Its main entrance is through a narrow stone gate. Made of real stones, misshapen stones, stones that men would’ve dug up with a shovel and heaved out of the earth with their bare hands.

Past the gate, it’s quiet inside. Sleepy. Like a small and forgotten corner of a big, fast-moving world. The sound of cars from the adjoining suburban street is subdued into a muted moan, scarcely perceivable, soaked up by the cemetery’s open space. Squadrons of squirrels tear around the grass in circles. Maple trees blush red and orange, perhaps preempting their nakedness to come, and elm trees twist upward in hundred-year-old spirals, their bright green turned a dull silver. A slight breeze sways the branches, carrying the scent of damp earth, dry leaves, and pure ozone, and for a moment I swear I can hear the blood running in my ears, seizing through my arteries, pumping from my chest.

Anyway, like I was saying, about once a week, I walk through the graveyard. It’s more of a stroll, really. The slower I walk, the more the world opens up before me. Sometimes, I play a game where I try to find the oldest gravestone in the whole place. I’m at 1887 so far. Which isn’t that old, I’ll admit, but for Canada, it’s about as old as it gets. There might be a few that are older. The game isn’t finished yet. But with the real old gravestones, the ones where green-blue lichen crawls across their gray faces like five o’clock shadow, the letters are so faint I can hardly make them out, as if they’re some strange foreign language, ancient runes scratched into rock. Probably made faint from all those years of being beaten by wind and rain and snow and bleached by sun. All those years of being out there alone, standing steadfast and stolid, left there to endure the elements.

The reason I return, about once a week, is some strange mix of sadness and sweetness, a sense of remoteness that rises up from the soul like smoke, as if being in the presence of old things was a kind of secret and available drug. There’s this remembrance of what I am and what is waiting that becomes crystal clear in these moments.

What I am struck by as I walk—and I know I’m going to sound pretty sentimental and naive here, but it’s the honest truth—is the fact that each gravestone is not just a rock in the ground, but a life. Not that the rocks are actually alive or I hear them speaking to me or anything, but they are a marker, a stand-in, for what was once a living and breathing person. A baby who was born and held in their mother’s arms. A child who played outside in the summertime until dark, when the sodium lamp lights on their street fizzed on, one by one, and their dad yelled to come inside for bed. Who couldn’t sleep the night before Christmas. Who grew up and fell in love and cleaned the kitchen, who worried about money and how much they weighed and was probably scared to die and then did die.

I don’t mean to be dark or depressing. That’s not the point. Maybe I’m only thinking about this stuff because it’s November and the trees look like skeletons and everything outside is cold and hard and lifeless and the days are dark and getting darker and I can’t help but feel it’s all a testament to the truth that this world is filled with beautiful and precious things all careening toward decay.

Walking through the graveyard, I think to myself how, with only ten plain and inexpressive words, words that would make even Hemingway envious, every stone tells a story. Really, every stone tells more than a story because, like any living and breathing person, it refuses to be compacted into an idea, compressed into something that I can fit inside my head.

For instance, the other day I walked by the gravestone of a woman who came over from Ireland. Probably on one of those big iron steamboats. I noticed there was a third date, apart from birth and death, sometime in her 30s, with three words: “Saved by Grace.” Important enough, evidently, to be on her gravestone. Important enough for her friends and family and the people who buried her body to know this date, because she must have saved this date, kept it close for fifty years and refused to forget it, this specific day where something intense and meaningful and life-and-death-significant happened to her. Almost as if she saw it as a second birth.

Then, I walked by a stone with a whole family of four listed, almost grotesque in its tidy simplicity. And I wondered whether they were poor, buried on one plot because it was cheaper, and what the man did to put food on the table for his family—because that was the expectation back then—whether he sat in his chair by the fireplace late into the evenings, vacant eyes boring a hole in the worn floorboards, palms cold and clammy, a knot of nervous intensity in his stomach, not knowing where the money will come from that month. As I scanned down the names, I noticed their eldest son only made it to twenty, leaving his parents and younger sister to live on without him. And I thought about how brutal that must have been, the kind of thing you imagine only happens to other people. Those long silences at the dinner table and answering the same shallow questions about how they’re doing and what they did with the empty bedroom, whether they kept the door open or shut.

I can feel a nostalgia even for people I never knew.

After, I stopped to read the gravestone of a woman named Gloria, who lived well past eighty but lost her husband at sixty-five. And thought of all the late mornings she must’ve had drinking cold coffee at the kitchen table and the winter nights on one side of a bed that’s entirely too big and all the effort of trying to sew the shreds of her life back together into something worth living, pretending to be happy for the sake of her children, having lost a battle she never fought.

I know I’m projecting. I know most of this is untrue in a literal, historical sense. But that doesn’t trump or trivialize the fact that these people had deep and complex and full lives. Lives that began and then ended.

Sometimes my mind goes to all the families down the generations and across all the nations who loved each other within the four walls of their home. Who loved fiercely, loved uniquely. Families who played euchre every Saturday night after supper and celebrated birthdays with the same chocolate cake. Families who didn’t have much but romanced the ordinary. Who shared in the intricacies of love, with its nicknames and nagging, flaws you slowly learn to grow fond of, unspoken rituals that become almost holy in their familiarity. The conversational landscapes worn and well-trodden as fewer and fewer stones are left unturned. Families who are now all long gone and forgotten. As if they never were.

And I know too, with the kind of dread we feel for all the most certain things in life, there will come a tomorrow when I will no longer stumble down my street, walk through this graveyard, wander these dirt paths. A tomorrow when others will recall this thinking and feeling soul that I am with a vague, “I wonder what’s become of him?” I know that there is a day stamped for the last time my name will leave someone’s lips, never to be heard again. And everything I do, everything I feel, everything I experience—this universe I am to myself—will be just one less passerby, one less stranger on the street, and one more stone in the ground¹.

That’s what flashes through my head as I bumble through the graveyard, subconsciously unconscious, barely looking where I am going.

Because here’s the thing about loss no one talks about: the worst part is not the grief, but the knowledge that the grief will pass. The worst part is that someone who we saw every day, someone whose very existence seemed fused to our own, someone we thought we’d never have to inhabit this planet without, will leave. Fade into a memory. Then, something less than that. And the sharp particulars of their lives will become dull and distant, and all we can do is strain to remember, barely holding onto the very basics of their humanity, the sound of their voice, their laugh, what colour their eyes were. As much as we replay the past and try to keep the pain alive, the numbness will lift and colour will slowly ache back into things. Life will go on.

But it’s brutal, you know. How life doesn’t stop. For anyone. How the world keeps moving forward, marching on, indifferent to whether we’re ready to move along with it. How we can’t hold on and keep living. How they wouldn’t want us to. How the beautiful things in our lives are entirely too brief and then all we are left with is a crummy gray rock in the ground in an old empty cemetery no one visits but squirrels, with letters that grow more and more faint until no one can read them anymore even if, about once a week, they stop and squint and try really hard because they’re playing a game to find the oldest date in the whole graveyard.

All you have are these memories that pile up, that collect dust, memories that feel fugitive as your past increasingly becomes a fiction, like a novel written by a stranger, even though you alone were a witness to it.

Yet as you sew yourself back together, stitch by stitch, in the early mornings and the late evenings, one day you suddenly understand you are not the same person who tore apart all those lifetimes ago. And, as much as you try to fight it, there is a love that bids you welcome. There is a love that runs after you, that pulls you out of the pit, that casts aside your chains and places you squarely in the freedom of space². A love that enters through the very wounds you thought would never heal.

As I’m thinking all this, quite against my will, I resurface to realize a soft and purple twilight has settled on the cemetery, bathing everything in beauty.

I go to check the time but my watch is still stuck at 5:10, just like it was last time I checked it and the time before that, because it stopped ticking thirteen years ago right when my grandfather’s heart did, but that’s just the way I like it. I’m not saying it makes sense. All I’m saying is if you’re going to wear your grandfather’s watch—the one he always wore, the one that you’d never see him without, even when he was in the kitchen prepping the Christmas turkey and would swish around the house in his MEC hiking pants and smelt like fresh air and smoke, the very same metal that wrapped his wrist when it was still warm just like it wraps around mine—doesn’t it seem poetically sound that it’s not ticking?

I’m not going to pretend any of this is that practical or will change your life. Like all the people nowadays who try to force-feed you the ideas inside their head as if you are sick and they have the medicine. It’s not like you can live like this, with these deep and nebulous thoughts. It wouldn’t be very conducive to workplace performance. But I’m not sure what else to do with these untamed ideas of mine other than lay them at your feet, with the regality and mild guilt of a housecat with a dead bird on the doorstep.

Lost in thought, I walk home like a burning building, like a house on fire, alienated from myself, a stranger to myself, drunk in reverie but sobered by a sweet and edifying sadness, listening to the symphony that is inside of me, utterly unable to discern the different instruments, walking by trees and squirrels and rocks, near bumping into things in my cloud of contemplation, watching the island of memory that I stand on erode with each passing day, knowing a paradise is only something that has been lost, every memory I have fizzling bright then fading softly and quietly inside me, Proust’s line echoing through my ears like a prophecy, bouncing between infinity and eternity. “Tell yourself this, too, for it is a kind of pleasure to know that you will never love less, that you will never be consoled, that you will constantly remember more and more.”

Your friend,

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1. This is where you get to the whole chicken and egg problem of heaven or any other kind of afterlife: Did we create it because of our desire to live beyond death or do we desire to live beyond death because it’s been created? I thought long and hard about this for a long and hard time and came to believe the latter. I don’t see how I could imagine and desire life beyond death unless it was real. Assuming I’m not clinically insane.

I think part of the thrust of this essay, now we’re in the footnotes and I can go on an unedited tangent, is to gesture towards the conviction I have that death, the permanence of death, isn’t just sad; it’s wrong. And it makes sense that God, if you believe in God—whatever “believe” and “God” might mean—would plant that conviction in our hearts so we turn and seek eternal life. So we seek Him (or whatever other hopeless reflexive pronoun you want to use).

2. Loosely paraphrasing something Hans Urs von Balthasar said about God’s love, from memory.