Yesterday was Thanksgiving and we went over to be with the family. On the whole, it was a pleasant get-together. The food was good (and plentiful) and the antics around the table were suitably amusing, especially since the family’s next generation is in their 20s, starting out in careers and generally experiencing the exhilaration of young adulthood. There was also entertainment from the dog and the cat who live at the house where we got together. We hadn’t been together as a family in a few months, so it was good to be together again.
On the way out of town, we stopped by the cemetery to visit my mother’s gravesite. We lost her back in January, when a sudden illness took advantage of frailties she either hadn’t known about or had kept well-hidden from the rest of us. (Since she was one of the most selfless people I have ever known, and never wanted to ever be a bother to anyone, I can’t help thinking it was the latter.) Not two weeks into the new year, she was suddenly gone. Everything changed for all of us. We have mostly coped well, but as you can imagine, every family get-together now has a hole blown in it the exact size and shape of her.
My mother now rests on a hill in the town cemetery, in a site that had been bought years ago by my folks as a family burial area. A couple years back, they had a gravestone made and had a granite perimeter installed and gravel poured in. I remember the day I saw that grave marker for the first time, with my parents’ names and dates of birth, and below it the area where, someday, another date would be carved in. It was sobering, for here was a hard, cold reminder that my parents’ days on this earth would someday run out, and they had prepared. This thing I hadn’t wanted to think about? It was no longer unavoidable. I had no idea it would be needed so soon, that within a couple years that second date would be carved in. But we’re not the ones writing the script.
Family burials aren’t new to me. My great-grandmother, who lived with my great-grandfather in a house next door to my grandparents, died when I was eight. It was my first close experience with death and maybe I was too young to really grab its meaning. Two years later my great-grandfather, who had spent two years in mourning, passed away. I remember going to the visitation for him, seeing him in his casket, this man who had been so gentle to me, told me stories, sang funny songs to me, had this marvelous hearty laugh when I’d say something he thought was funny, who always had a stick of gum in the front pocket of his bib overalls that he’d tear in half and give half to me…he was now lifeless in that box, wearing his best suit on the voyage into forever. Somehow I had accepted it and yet was still numb to it. I missed him, I knew I’d never hear that laugh of his again, and yet I somehow knew there was no escaping the reality. I knew he hadn’t been well, and there was one memory of visiting him in the hospital that had genuinely scared me. Somehow I got the concept of death as release. I thought I was supposed to cry, but I was oddly logical about it. I knew crying wouldn’t bring him back.
The next time was almost a decade and a half later. My parents had to rescue my paternal grandfather, who had fallen victim to Alzheimer’s Disease, and we took care of him at home until he could get accepted at a care facility. When he passed away there early in the new year, it was more a relief than anything. The man I had known was long gone. He was buried next to the site my parents had bought for the family, and after the funeral service we gathered as a family and embraced, and many in the circle wept. Again, I couldn’t. I was sad for them, and I knew it was a grim milestone in our lives, but his passing had been a release. The man I had known was long gone before he died. I had already mourned. I was sad for my father, who grieved a man he hadn’t known that well (to make a long story short, his parents separated when he was young, and my dad wasn’t reunited with his dad until he was almost 40 years old). But I hadn’t known my grandfather that well, hadn’t seen him that often, and what I did remember of him was gone. To me the shock came not at his passing, but when my parents brought him home after rescuing him, when this man from my childhood memories was suddenly this frail shell of a man who was no longer occupying this plane. It felt, to use a phrase I sometimes overuse, like walking straight into a plate glass window.
After that, the passings came more steadily. My father-in-law died a few years later, after a long final illness. My paternal grandmother (with whom I had never really gotten along) died a few years after that. A few years later, my mother-in-law passed away. And then my maternal grandparents passed away, though I had known their days were numbered, especially my poor grandmother after a sad, decades-long struggle with progressive dementia. And thus were my parents the last line standing. Now that line is half gone, and emotionally I am preparing for the inevitable.
But, really, the relatives are only half the story of why things feel so different now when I’m back home. It’s because so many of the people I remember from the town where I grew up are now up on that hill, too. Some of them are relatives, but others were part of the fabric that made up the town I knew as a youngster: the eccentrics, the gossips, the neighbors, the people who knew how to do a particular something and could do it really well, the men who helped build the house I grew up in, the folks who were there when you needed them, no matter what it was you needed. The friend, confined to her home with chronic illness, who used to call me to talk about baseball (and whom I loved even though she was a Yankees fan), and her mother, a very sweet woman who looked like Imogene Coca. One by one, they filled the empty spaces in that graveyard. Someday, sooner rather than later, those still among us will join them.
In my younger days I’d go on long walks around town on sunny summer evenings. It let me get out of the house and also gave me some exercise. Most evenings, the far point of my journey would be the cemetery. I’d wander through the paths, stopping sometimes to visit the tombstones of people I remembered or to read decades-old inscriptions on overgrown headstones. And, often, this song would be in my head, for it captured exactly how I felt:
Sometimes I’d hear that the neighbors had noticed me walking up to the cemetery so often. In the way of small-town gossips they wondered what was behind it, as if there was something weird or occult about me being there. I’m not sure they would have bought my explanation: I was up there so often because it was peaceful there, because I was fascinated by the little clues about the lives of those who were now at rest there. I was fascinated by the grave markers of the long-gone Woodmen of the World members, carved to resemble hewn timbers; the ornate marker, tall as I was and longer still, for a family of obvious means; the heart-shaped marker with a lamb atop, the resting place of an infant. Some of those graves were a century old, even then. It was soothing to be there, the stories telling themselves on a warm summer evening, the setting sun glowing gently, the crickets singing away. The people in those graves were long gone, in some cases more than a century, and yet I still felt their presence somehow.
Three decades later, so many of the people who are now there are people I knew somehow. One or two were more or less from my generation, cut down by cancer or chronic disease, and that makes it cut even deeper. If that’s how I feel, I can’t imagine what it’s like for my father. He visits my mother’s grave just about every day. A few months ago I rode to the cemetery with him on the secondhand golf cart he uses for short trips in town. After we’d spent time with Mom, he took me on a meandering tour through several gravesites. Every turn brought us to another grave of someone about whom he had a memory. I’d often hear a sad “he was a good fellow.” Dad is 82 now, has survived a couple of health scares in recent years, and is in good health. His mind is sharp and he can still get in a day’s work in the field on the tractor. And yet there are times when I understand why living a long life is a double-edged sword, why you never want to wish for immortality: you will live to see so many of the people you love be lost. The Green Mile will seem so long.
In my own mind, I find myself fighting waves of nostalgia, and the older I get and the more complicated I find the modern world, the more tempting a refuge it becomes. On occasion it’s made me wonder if someday I’ll move back to the tiny town where my story began. Almost as quickly, though, I remember that town no longer exists. Yes, it’s in the same place on the map. Many of the landmarks are still there. The house where I grew up is still there. But it’s not the same. Most of the people who made it the town I remember are now up on that hill. New people have moved in and, in their way, made the town theirs – and that’s good, for it keeps the town alive, and it’s also not right for me to expect that town to live up to my expectations. My nostalgia also elides the frustrations I so often felt, that I had to get out and experience a bigger world than I could ever find there, that the images in my mind from a childhood reading the encyclopedia had to become my own reality that I could experience firsthand, and I knew I couldn’t find that if I stayed there.
I’ve built a decent life, on my own terms. I’ve done not only so many things I wanted to do, but so many things I never imagined I could. I’ve been, as the song says, blessed and lucky. I’m also still hungry for things I haven’t yet been able to do, but it gives me something to keep going, and sometimes that’s as important as anything else. Be that as it may, it’s a life I’ve lived on my own terms. That little town will always be my hometown, and I’ll always be thankful it was. Not for the riches of Nineveh and Tyre would I trade growing up there, in a place that will forever live on in my heart. But in many ways, my idea of my hometown now belongs to history. Now, the rural acreage we happened into many years ago and the goofy little house we built there, the expanse of pines and the wildlife that frequently ambles through…over the last two decades, through financial and emotional commitment, that’s become home, the place that re-centers me, the place where (barring some kind of unforeseen calamity) I’m content to spend the rest of my days, on my own terms.
My little hometown will always call me back. I’ll always relate to Martin Sloan, age thirty-six, vice president in charge of media, wanting to escape to his days of childhood, giving in to that errant little wish, needing to be reminded that where he came from, there were merry-go-rounds and band concerts, and that maybe he hadn’t been looking in the right place.
The more I’ve been looking behind me, the more I’m reminded I have to look ahead.
