November in April

Easter 2007 - The Cemetery

There were two-white crocuses blooming in the center of their plot and the tulips were starting to poke through the sandy soil. The place was busy and it seemed like an invasion of my privacy. I really missed them today when I went there. I don't always feel this way or, maybe I just don't let myself. I guess I have changed a little since the last time because today it didn't feel obligatory. I wanted to be there.
I don't have much else to say on it so I am going to paste in a piece I wrote back in November, the last time I went to the cemetery.

Journal Entry - November, 2006
I started getting that feeling again. I was crashing and burning, my heart was racing and my face felt flush. I just wanted to shake it but I couldn't. That awful feeling stayed with me all the way to the cemetery where my sister planted bulbs at the graves of my parents and brother.
I starting feeling a little better so I played off of my sister's paranoia about breaking cemetery rules (for planting things that grow) and told her that I would keep on the lookout for the graveyard police.

I wandered down my parents row to where a guy I work with has his son buried. His kid, 23, fell out of a window on an upper floor of an apartment building in Manhattan while he was at a party. Nobody at the party noticed he was gone. Somebody found him on the pavement the alley below the next day. We've (Me and work friend) shared some miserable humor about having loved ones buried in the same row (4 plots apart), people stealing plastic flowers and the graveyard police. We've also talked about meeting there after work some day to drink Guinness until the cops came to throw us out. I'd like that.

There is another headstone, one row over and five down in the other direction from my parents that has an excerpt from a Winne the Pooh Story written on the back. If I feel bad about not feeling sad at my parents grave, I can always walk over to this grave, read the Winne the Pooh excerpt, (Christopher Robin tells Pooh that he will never forget him) and fill up with tears. The kid was seven and it looks like he was sick for a while before he died. There is a tribute to his courage written by his dad on the front of the stone.

After we left my parents grave, we drove to the other side of the cemetery to my brother's. The harmonica I laid there last time was kicked up over on the next plot. I figured the groundskeeper hit it with a weed whacker or something so I asked my sis to set it back in the dirt when she was done with her illegal planting.
It was dusk, the wind was blowing and there were breaks in the clouds that were lumbering across the sky. I was cold and I wanted to leave sister alone so, I walked down the road towards the grave of a good childhood friend of mine who was killed in a car crash ten years ago. (yup another dead person but its cemetery, remember?) His name was XXX and we used to hang out every day after school. When we grew older, we grew apart like most childhood friends. By the time we went to high school we were hanging out in different circles. I've never been able to find his grave since the day they buried him. I still haven't.

About a quarter of the way down the road, my attention waned and I began to notice that all the headstones at the end of each row were small. They were graves for babies. As I came up from behind on one after another, I turned to read the epitaph on each. Most of the headstones just had a name. I thought that they were were stillborns but I'm wasn't sure. A few were for children, who died when they were one, two, and four years old.

I came upon a single headstone with the names of two infants. They were brothers, Salvatore and Dominic and they died on the same day, November 12th, one year apart, 1961 and 1962. 1962 was the year that I was born. I thought of their parents and how horrible that must have been for them. I wondered if they were ever right afterwards or if their grief split them apart.. I wondered if they were still born or if they both died of crib death and then my thoughts trailed off on a murder-mystery-tangent before I caught myself. My last thought was that November must be a really shitty month for them. November is a shitty month.

Down a little further, there was one head stone that was the third in on row. It was a knee high white stone and the writing on it was weathered. It read "baby Spooner - 1957," that's all. There was a black Cadillac matchbox on the base of the stone and there was some other little plastic toy laying upside on the ground. The model year of the matchbox had be late 60s or 70s but, it looked brand new. Baby spooner was still important to someone.
While I was walking back to meet my sister, my eyes teared from a combination of the cold wind, the day, the month and my fucking life.

We left.