When I was very young, I lived at the bottom of a hill. If you've never lived at the bottom of a hill, let me tell you, it's not a great place to live, especially when a lot of drunk people come down that hill at all hours of the night. You'd be amazed at how often running into a fence seems like a good idea to people.
At the top of the hill is the cemetery for the surrounding communities. Everyone has people buried up there, and, perhaps most especially, I do. The majority of my mother's side of the family, both her mother's relatives and her father's, find their final rest in this one location. So I have a very strong connection to this place. There is now, actually, more ties to me in this cemetery than there are in the rest of the world, which is an odd concept.
There is a church building in front of graveyard and most of the time it sits empty. On occasion, some congregation will ask to meet there, but it never lasts for long. Whenever this would happen, my grandmother and her friends would always be very mistrustful of the situation. They tended to view any "start up churches" as cults, scam artists, or possibly devil worshipers. In the duration of these people being in the church, they would be a constant topic of conversation, usually spoken of in low and exasperated tones. Whenever they would finally pack up and go away, everyone in the community seemed far happier.
One of my earliest memories is of being at the cemetery with my grandmother as she showed me the various graves of people related to me. One of them was a child's grave, a brother my grandfather lost when he was young. As a very small kid, I would stare at that grave for a long time, somewhat both horrified and fascinated by the idea of the little skeleton buried in the box. That kind of thing makes one realize that even children are mortal at quite a young age.
There are three areas of extreme controversy in the graveyard. One of them is related to me! A have a second or third cousin who is given to drinking. When his wife died, he bought one of those double headstones with her name one one side and his on the other. It's kind of creepy to have your name on a headstone when you're still alive, but it's also rather pragmatic. The scandal comes from the fact that a few years after his wife died, he found a girlfriend. When she died, he had her buried on the other side of where he is to be buried, with her own smaller headstone. It is unclear where he will place further girlfriends past this point.
The second scandal has to do with a way a certain family processed losing their son. At the suggestion of a grief counselor, a mailbox was placed by his grave so that people could write him letters and put them in there. While this was a symbolic gesture, the old timers were just horrified by this. The explanation I was given, again in those hushed and exasperated tones, was that this was quite close to trying to commune with the dead. Which, bordered on evil and was certainly creepy.
However, no scandal will ever top the one created by a member of the local outlaw family. Said family (because into any isolated rural community, a Snopes-esque family shall fall), had, during the generation of my parents, found meaning and community in local biker gangs and drugs. This is quite a dangerous combination, as was most clearly seen when one of the biker's lost his life in a pretty nasty wreck. The funeral included a multi-motorcycle procession, horrified the strait-laced citizens of the area, as they road through the streets and up the hill to the cemetery.
As bad as this was, it was only one moment in time. The fact that his headstone has his biker name on it is what sends most people from that area back into those hushed and exasperated tones. You see, his biker name was "Little Jesus." To this day, people remain offended.
It's May now, which means people will be changing out the decorations in the cemeteries. And while I have an uncle on my mom's side still living, he doesn't live close, so it is our turn to be the ones who set down flowers.
In a couple of weeks, we'll buy some fake and pretty sprays of foliage and drive out to the graveyard to place them on the graves of my mother and grandparents. We'll push our pant legs down into our socks so that the Lyme-infested ticknasties can't bite us and we'll stand in front of stones with the names of people who are responsible for us being here and we'll smile a little, happy we could keep this promise.
You know, it's not like it was a spoken promise. I don't think Mom ever asked for us to put flowers on her grave. I don't even think my grandparents did. It was promised never-the-less. Each May, you will have flowers. You will be remembered. Not that you are ever forgotten.
I think of all the strange things about being human, having a connection with a graveyard is one of the strangest. There is a place in the world where everyone, most of the time, is dead. This place holds my history, it connects me to my childhood, and it has given me stories. This place is part of my past, but part of my present as well.
One day in the future, I will be part of it. One with the graveyard.
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