Every Sunday, I snake my way through the cemetery gate. I walk fast and hard through the rows of tombstones, leather satchel thumping at my hip like a heartbeat, and let my eyes skim the names on the family graves: the Eatons, the Marsdens, the Trowbridges. I have my favorites.
I was in preschool when I first visited a cemetery. Every week my class would trot down to the school’s chapel, where paintings of Christ’s crucifixion hung above a replica of his crown of thorns. His corpse dangled between his speared hands; his ribs formed a cavern, shadows stretching down over his bloodied loincloth. He was the first dead person I’d ever seen. My teacher spoke to Him on our weekly trips with her hands clasped in prayer, worriedly whispering about her daughter’s growing distance from God.
I didn’t talk with Jesus. Every week I squirmed beneath Christ’s crucifix, picking and chewing at my stumpy fingers while everyone prayed. There was something about the crowds of devout and their attention, focused on Jesus like sunlight through a magnifying glass. I didn’t believe as hard as they did; I never heard God whispering back to me. I could never hear God’s words bouncing from the ceiling of the church; I could only hear the whispered prayers and worries of the congregants.
In a cemetery, my thoughts could echo back at me. My family had been driving up the PCH, past a long stretch of flat land marred only by rows upon rows of pale white headstones, when I felt that first tug to the tombs. From my car seat, I begged and pleaded for us to stop. I spent hours trotting through that cemetery, stopping and staring at each marker. When I whispered to the gravestones, I could only hear the rush of California cicadas, the flat whistle of the Santa Ana winds, and the echoes of my thoughts and questions. That day was the first conversation I had with the dead.
Once I’d started, I couldn’t stop. I attended cemeteries like my classmates attended church. I’d hover over the graves that struck me most: the tombstones with fresh flowers, the crypts with carved names, and the mausoleums that looked like chapels. I’d sit and whisper in front of my favorites, my hands pressed together like my teacher’s had been. I’d ask them if they liked the wind rolling over their graves, if they were glad they’d seen their last winter, if life had been all they thought it’d be. Over time, those questions changed. I asked if it was wrong to skip pages in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, if stealing marbles from Ms. Sitrick’s marble jar made me a bad person. I found my moral compass in the dead, in the voices I conjured from their tombstones.
Every Sunday, I dart across Grove Street to the looming cemetery gate. At nineteen, I don’t ask the same questions I once did. I don’t crouch over the tombstones, asking Samuel Marsden – dead at 68 – what he thinks about my morally dubious exploits at the latest frat party. I don’t really ask them anything. Instead, I walk a different path each time. I follow the warm sunlit rows of graves, feel the tingling heat against my skin, and remind myself of my mortality. I don’t know how many more winters I have left, how many days in the sunlight remain, but I live my life the way I think the dead would want me to: wild and hot-blooded and free. Maybe one day, when I’m dead and gone, a toddler will dawdle over my grave. Hopefully, I’ll have something to tell him.
