Graveside

The things that I say to my deceased grandfather are private. Standing by the side of his grave on a summer afternoon, I begin a mental conversation with him. It has been a long time since I last visited, maybe years. Months after he died, I still saw him in my dreams. He doesn’t visit me anymore, maybe payback for me being as delinquent to his graveside. Everything looks different from when I’ve seen it last. There are still the familiar tombstones worn by age and weather—the marble carving of the twelve apostles standing in a circle and facing out, the huge mausoleums dedicated to a Mother and a Father, the sleeping cherub guarding a baby’s grave, one who had passed through life far too quickly to enjoy living it. 

But there are so many new graves now, decorated with silk flowers bursting with color and windmills spinning furiously in the ground, giving the illusion of life and movement when all else is silent and still. I get the driving directions wrong as I look for the Lion’s Gates. I wander the vicinity of my grandpa’s grave, shoes sinking in the soft, tilled ground, looking for his monument. I hear his crotchety old voice as I find it and approach—“Lost again, Little Kitten? Because you haven’t visited for so long. No wonder you don’t know where I lay anymore.” I stand there and ignore his goading as I had done when he still lived. I tell him what had come to pass, what is currently happening, what I hope are things that will come to be.

My next-door neighbor recently passed away from Lymphoma. He was only 46. He welcomed us to the neighborhood when we first moved in; he gave us home-improvement advice; he was one of those neighbors that made us feel lazy as he would always put out holiday decorations first or keep his yard flourishing when our own lawn was shriveling up and we would only care to take a nap. I have donned black funeral dresses far too often this year, sat in pews as services were held, remembering the dead. My neighbor is survived by his wife of 11 years and his son, who had just turned 4 this summer. I think about the distant future and inevitable separation with my own husband and cannot bear the loss. We humans are destined to go to the grave as we entered the womb—alone. I think about the blue-eyed, blond boy—asking where his father is, why can’t he visit, why they don’t talk to each other anymore—and try to swallow my pain.

My neighbor will be buried at the same cemetery where my grandfather rests. I think of spiritual lives intersecting in a different plane, across time and space. My mom says my grandpa’s Buddhist soul had long since transitioned from this world to be reincarnated, and maybe it’s because I was brought up with Western ideologies, but I feel that he watches over me still. In his crotchety sort of way. Complaining that I don’t eat enough, tiny kitten that I am, or reminding me to make my bed each morning, not to let the house get too dirty. Thanks, Gramps, for instilling my early onset of OCD. As I bid him goodbye and walk back to my car, I concentrate on the warm sunlight on my skin. The fresh breeze blowing across the rolling hillside. The comfort of love. The laughter of friends. I take these things and try to fill, with their small but reassuring presence, the emptiness in my heart.