Whistling in the Graveyard

I was going to send him an email, but writing it did not go well. The thing is that in general, if I have an emotion that is more complex than happy or angry, I think about something else until it goes away. For major occasions, such as the death of family member, I am sometimes forced to acknowledge sad.

My mother called to see if I was going to call him. “No,” I told her. “We spent, like, three hours together yesterday. That’s enough togetherness and confusion for one weekend. I’m going down to the river to go for a long hike by myself.”

I wander. If I intend to go somewhere, I walk backwards and whistle while looking intently elsewhere. It was 26 degrees out; I dug through a box to find the fleece and jacket I used to wear to ski, remnants of another life, and I put on two pairs of socks and my best hiking boots. The boots came from Sheila, a friend who died in December. They still had tidy, artfully placed daubs of mud on them from the one time she wore them to a picnic at my family’s property on the Licking River in Kentucky.

As I was leaving – I had already loaded an old dresser (missing one drawer) into the back of my truck to burn in the meadow when I was done hiking – I picked up my phone to put it in my pocket; instead, I called him. “I’m going to Spring Grove Cemetery to take pictures; do you want to come?”

He isn’t like me. He sits still until he’s decided where he’s going. Once he’s made up his mind, he stands up, makes a declarative statement, and starts walking. “Yes,” he said.

I put my phone in my pocket, I applied some mascara, I got my camera, and I left.

Spring Grove is the second largest cemetery in the United States, after Rose Hills Cemetery in California. When the location was selected in the 1840s, it was supposed to be a rural cemetery, remote enough to be undisturbed by the expansion of the city. Expansion rolled past it; many of the factories built in the immediate area are long defunct now. For over 160 years, the most fashionable dead of Cincinnati have been buried there.

I’ve never been there for a funeral; one of my great-uncles is buried there, but I don’t know where – it’s big and he died 21 years before I was born. From my house, though, I can walk there in 15 minutes; I go to wander, to wonder about the husband buried alone with his wife’s space left empty next to him; either she is still alive at 126 years of age, or she decided that she did not want to spend eternity with him after all. In February, this seems particularly sad.

I go to find Carrie Hirley’s grave; she died at 5 years old. Her headstone is adorned with a stuffed Winnie-the-Pooh, a one-month-sober coin from AA, a token from Don’s Car Wash (where better soap + reliable and quality equipment = cleaner cars), an Elton John Fan Club tie tack, 40 cents in change, some pinecones; she died in 1876.

I go to tell myself stories, to mourn for all of these dead I do not know, to love them in their excessive quiet, in their flashes of tackiness; to walk, to be alone in my boots.

Maybe I don’t have enough dead people of my own. I loved my Grandma Betty; I don’t know where she was buried, or even if she was buried.

Years before my Grandma Ellie died, she took me her plot in a Florida cemetery; she showed me her marker – a brass plaque flush with the ground, right next to the one for my grandfather. Their names were already there.

“Now Molly,” Grandma Ellie said. “When I’m dead – I want you to promise me –”

For my whole life, my Grandma Betty told me that she would be my guardian angel when she died. I was born an atheist; I believe in what I can see and smell and touch. Nevertheless, after she died, I was constipated for 10 days. I could not go with my grandmother sitting on my shoulder. I waited for Grandma Ellie to exact my promise with a combination of dread and pleasure; she would be dead, but our relationship would not be over. I would have a job to do.

“Don’t spend a lot of money,” she said. “We have some Waterford – don’t use that. Go to the discount store and buy some martini glasses – and I want you to promise me that you’ll bring me one last martini.” A gin martini, on the rocks, 2 olives, and maybe a cigarette.

None of the graves at Spring Grove have martini glasses on them – none that I’ve ever found, anyway. Neither does my grandmother’s, yet. I will take her martini to her when I go to Florida for my grandfather's 90th birthday later this year. Since she quit smoking at 86, four years before she died, I’ll skip the cigarette. She was buried without shoes, in a blue dress that she wore to my brother’s wedding. She wanted to live long enough to come to my wedding, she said. “I’m not getting married, Grandma.”

Two weeks after she died last January 31, on Valentine’s Day, my grandfather, her husband of 65 years, was sufficiently recovered to take a large, red-foil-wrapped, heart-shaped box of chocolates to the widow lady down the street. She declined to be his sweetie, but he found another one.

As we walked in the cold taking pictures with our new cameras, we told each other stories. I told him about my grandparents. He told me about some of the relationships he's watched. “I don’t want a relationship like that,” we didn’t say to each other.

I didn’t say any of the things that I tried to put in the email. We walked around the whole perimeter of the second largest cemetery in the United States on the coldest day of the winter so far, taking pictures.

Months ago, I told him that there was no way I was ever going to have a romantic relationship with him, not in this lifetime. My lips were so cold that I couldn’t properly pronounce some words. I stepped backwards toward him while I was focusing on a statue of a lion. He is a man who likes clarity, who checks his assumptions; he stepped politely out of my way.

T. and Bao at the River

Aspirations

As a small child, I had clear goals about the things I would do when I grew up: I would draw on the walls; I would eat brownie mix without cooking it; I would stay up all night until morning reading books; I would not clean my room.

Perhaps I should have put a bit more thought into the question of what it means to be an adult; nevertheless, I've stepped into a half-eaten bowl of brownie mix on the floor of my bedroom (the walls of which are painted in patterns to match the rug) at 5 a.m. while trying to navigate my way down to the kitchen for another cup of coffee without putting my book down. I am living proof that dreams do come true.

When I got older, I knew not only what I was going to do, but what sort of person I was going to be while I was going to be while I was doing it: tough, self-sufficient, witty, cynical -- a little dangerous, maybe. My lifestyle, naturally, would include cigarettes and coffee and alcohol -- the glamour of self-destructivity.

I would have intellectual, artsy friends, some of whom would probably die tragically young. Writing their eulogies would be cathartic; I would do a splendid job of delivering them. I would not be happy, exactly -- happiness is an aspiration for cheerleaders, and I was no fucking cheerleader -- but I would be interesting. I would not be likable, exactly, but I would be quotable, which seemed preferable.

"I like to have a martini

Two the the very most --

After three, I'm under the table,

After four, I'm under my host."

Dorothy Parker cursed and drank and smoked and fucked; in a review of Emily Post's etiquette manual for The New Yorker, she concluded that following its precepts would inevitably render one exquisitely dull. She wrote. She was smart. She attempted suicide on multiple occasions and then published jokes about it. My aspirations, as a teen-ager, centered vaguely on emulating her example.

My internal narrator watched, amused; she had an acerbic wit, most often directed at me. At every turn, she made it clear that while I might manage to fuck up my life, I lacked whatever essential characteristic might have made it glamorous; I was simply absurd.

(She was the kind of girl who preferred to use the handicapped stall when vomiting in public restrooms; she saw this as an expression of her inner wilder nature. Wide open spaces simply appealed to her.)