The Lives We Bury

CW: Grief, illness, and suicidal ideation

“I tried goat cheese today, and I still hate it. And I know, I know, I’m supposed to try it again, but I’m telling you, it’s awful.”

I whisper the last part, as though someone might overhear me insulting cheese in a cemetery. My breath clouds the air, hanging between me and the headstone before disappearing.

“I know you’d find this eerie, visiting you at night. You loved the sun. Not me.” I pull my jacket closer to my jaw.

The cold has glued my fingers together. I work them apart inside my sleeves.

Visiting a grave at dusk in the middle of winter isn’t typical, but the sun blisters my face even when its heat can’t reach me. Besides, I hate mingling with the people who come during respectable hours. The polite smiles we exchange. The flowers we carry, knowing they’ll wither like the people we lay them upon. And the crying. I can’t stand the constant weeping.

I smile at the thought of all those dead flowers. I should have brought arugula.

I crouch beside my uncle’s grave, getting as close to the dirt as I can, as though he might hear about my awful day if I tell him from down here. Dust has settled in the grooves of his name. I brush at it with my thumb.

The sun sinks behind the trees. I stay until my legs refuse to hold me.

Then one gives out, and I fall sideways into the grass.

“At least it can’t break again, right?” I ask the headstone.

I grip its cold edge and pull myself upright. For a moment I stand there, looking down at the place where he is supposed to be, trying to imagine a man who once filled whole rooms reduced to the space beneath my feet.

“Sometimes I wish they’d just bury me, too.”

Even to the dead I attempt satire. The trouble is, I mean it with every bone in my body.

I reach for my weathered bag. Behind me, footsteps crunch through the leaves.

The sun has vanished. Gothic post lights line the cemetery paths, casting little islands of yellow onto the grass. How cliché. I turn around.

An old man stands a few feet away with a wheelbarrow and a shovel.

My first thought is that I could fight him.

“Now, don’t go saying things like that, darlin’.”

He wears overalls over a flannel shirt and a baseball cap with a team logo I don’t recognize. He looks like my grandpa. He looks like everyone’s grandpa.

His wheelbarrow is filled with single-stemmed flowers.

I smile. What else can I do?

“You’re out here late,” I say, looking around. No one else is in sight.

A lantern hangs from the wheelbarrow’s handle. Its candle illuminates his wrinkled face.

“Oh, I keep them company.” He tips his hat toward the graves.

I should leave. I can barely make out my uncle’s headstone now, and the stranger has a shovel. But the flowers catch my eye. Daisies, roses, irises, blooms I can’t name, all piled together in a black metal bin. Their colors seem impossibly bright against the dark.

“Do you collect those while you’re cleaning graves?”

The wind strikes my face. I pull my jacket tighter and wait.

The candle doesn’t flinch.

“Oh, these?” He glances at the flowers. “I’d have to show you. I don’t steal them, though.”

I should know better than to follow a strange man through a cemetery at night. I know that. Yet he moves with the unhurried air of someone who belongs here, and I want to know what grave needs so much floral decoration.

“Sure,” I say, pulling my bag against my chest. “Show me.”

“Watch your step. Come along.”

We walk in silence.

I am a woman talking to a tombstone about arugula. He is a man pushing flowers through a cemetery after dark. Neither of us is in a position to judge the other.

Leaves crackle beneath our shoes. The lantern passes over the headstones, lighting each one briefly before the dark takes it. The wind still pierces my skin, but near the flame there is a suggestion of warmth.

I have only visited my uncle once or twice since he died. It seemed silly to come. It wasn’t as if he knew. He was dead.

But this week has been heavy. I have been folded into dread and pain, dragging myself through the hours. He couldn’t have fixed any of it, even if he were alive. Still, I liked the thought of coming here to remember the life he once filled.

We turn toward the back of the cemetery.

I am now certain this man is going to kill me.

“These are the people I remember,” he says. “No one comes for them.”

I’m startled. I’d nearly forgotten he was beside me.

He stops at the grave. Its name and dates look ordinary enough. I imagine this section is for people with no families, or whose families stopped visiting. Missing souls.

“Why are they lost?” I ask.

“They aren’t lost.”

He takes a daisy from the wheelbarrow and lays it in front of the stone. He is meticulous, careful not to disturb a blade of grass. Then he tips his hat and moves on.

Maybe he knew that man.

We pass a whole row of names, dates, and single flowers. Only our footsteps disturb the quiet.

“Why doesn’t anyone visit them?” I ask.

“I don’t think they know they’re here.” His voice nearly disappears into the wind.

“Who?”

He is already placing another flower.

He turns toward me and lifts the shovel from the wheelbarrow.

I tighten my grip on my bag. Then I drop it into the dirt and brace myself with both hands.

He laughs. A joyous, almost boyish laugh.

“I’m not going to hurt you, silly girl. There’s a hole in the path that needs filling.” He turns away and smooths a rupture in the grass with the back of his shovel.

I bend to retrieve my bag. The candle flickers for the first time, throwing light across the stone beside me.

I read the name and freeze.

I rub my hand over the inscription. Harder. As though I might erase it.

“Don’t bother,” he calls without turning around. “It’s real.”

The tombstone bears my name.

Beneath it is an age: eight.

That can’t be.

I am alive.

I am twenty-eight.

“This isn’t correct!” I shout. “This is me!”

“Oh, I know.” He keeps working the shovel into the dirt.

I stagger to the next headstone.

My name again.

Thirty-one years old.

I stare at it. I haven’t even been thirty-one yet.

The cold leaves me. Heat climbs my neck and settles behind my face. What kind of joke is this? Who are all these people he is playing tricks on?

I snatch up the lantern and move along the row. Some names appear once. Others appear again and again, each with a different age. Farther down I find a third stone bearing my name.

Twelve years old.

Then another.

Twenty-one.

“I’m leaving,” I shout. “This isn’t funny. I’m not dead.”

He returns the shovel to the wheelbarrow, selects a flower, and places it before the stone marked eight.

“I’m right here!” I step toward him too quickly. Pain shoots through my leg, and I wince.

“I know, darlin’. You’ve been here many times. There are more of you here than you think.”

“I’ve never been here until my uncle died. And even then I didn’t want to come.”

He looks at me for a long moment.

“Think about it. What happened when you were a girl?”

My face burns. I don't want to answer him.

I turn and limp away, scanning the names. I am going to report this. I will find out who he is, who gave him permission to carve my name into stone.

Then the light vanishes.

I’ve walked beyond the lantern's reach. Darkness folds over my eyes. I stop moving. I can hear my heart racing, a pendulum knocked off its track.

I don't remember being eight. Who does?

Except I do.

I remember what happened at eight.

I didn't get to be eight for very long.

I was sick. Terribly sick.

In some ways, I have been sick ever since.

My hand rises to cover my mouth. I draw in a breath so sharply it hurts my ribs.

Did I die?

“Am I dead?” I call into the darkness. The words come out like puzzle pieces that no longer fit together.

“No, darlin’.”

I follow his voice back toward the lantern.

“Then what is that?” I ask, pointing to the smallest grave.

“She had to come here so you could survive.”

The words strike me harder than the shovel ever could.

“So that’s me?”

“She was.” He lifts the lantern until the light reaches my face.

I look down at the stone.

I remember her.

No one else remembers her the way I do. No one remembers everything she gave up. No one saw her life being saved as a kind of death. I thought that was only me.

“When something changes a person enough,” he says, “someone is left behind. People call it moving on. Getting better. Growing up.” He glances at the rows of graves. “Someone ought to remember the ones who didn't get to come along.”

I crouch beside the grave of my eight-year-old self.

She laughed. She rode bikes and Razor scooters. She ate too much shrimp. She hated when her uncle made her try a food before letting her decide she didn't like it. She loved the monkey bars.

I know her.

I can almost see her swinging by her knees, hair falling toward the ground, certain that someone would catch her if she slipped.

Then came the illness. The rooms filled with adults speaking in hushed voices. The treatments. The slow, bewildering work of learning what her body could and could not do.

She survived it.

But she was never quite that little girl again.

Tears fall onto the grass. I press my palm against the stone, trying to feel anything but cold.

“What we give up isn't gone?” I ask.

“No. It comes here. I make sure they aren't lonely.” He looks down at the flower he placed. “No one comes to visit them.”

How do you grieve for someone you once were?

I glance toward the grave marked twelve. I know what ended there, too.

An infusion gone wrong. The feeling of my lungs closing around my bones. Months of rehabilitation, away from school, while friendships thinned and disappeared. I learned to lie whenever anyone asked what had happened to me.

At twenty-one, I cracked my skull open. A year of rehabilitation followed: pain, dizziness, physical therapy, and the deafening experience of being a stranger in my own body.

I thought I had endured those things and kept going. I didn’t understand that keeping going meant leaving people behind.

I begin to cry in earnest.

All these graves are mine.

All these years, these moments, these versions of myself, buried in the dirt. Not failures. Not people I should have been ashamed of. Girls and women who carried me as far as they could.

The groundskeeper waits. For once, he doesn't joke.

Then I remember the other stone.

“Why is there a grave for thirty-one?” I ask. “Am I going to die at thirty-one?”

“I don't know that. No one does.”

“But you put my name on it.”

“I tend the graves, darlin’. I don't decide when they're needed.”

I look at the untouched earth beneath the stone. No flowers. No disturbed soil. Nothing to suggest anyone has been buried there yet.

“Then why is it here?”

He takes the lantern from my hand and hangs it on the wheelbarrow.

“Some people spend their whole lives waiting to become who they used to be,” he says. “Others are frightened of who they'll become next.”

“That doesn't answer my question.”

“No,” he says softly. “It doesn't.”

I hate him a little for that.

He starts back along the path, and I follow. The wheelbarrow rattles over the uneven ground. We pass the graves of strangers who might be eating dinner right now, arguing with their spouses, kissing their children goodnight, unaware that someone is keeping flowers for the people they used to be.

At the edge of the older section, I stop.

“Are you dead?” I ask him.

He rests both hands on the wheelbarrow handles. In the lantern light, his face looks older than it did before.

“Depends who you ask.”

“Do you have a grave here?”

He smiles, but it isn't the joyous laugh from earlier.

“Who would bring me flowers?”

Before I can answer, he tips his cap and wheels the barrow into the darkness. The candle moves between the trees until I can no longer see it.

I find my uncle's grave by the light of the cemetery lamps. Dust still lies in the grooves of his name where my thumb couldn't reach.

“I met someone strange,” I tell him.

I wait, as though he might have something to say.

“And I still hate goat cheese.”

I almost laugh. Instead, I sit beside him for another minute, letting the cold settle into my knees.

I came here to visit a man I had lost. Somewhere beyond the trees were four more people I hadn't known I was allowed to miss.

When I stand, I notice a single daisy caught in my bag strap. I don't remember putting it there.

I carry it back toward the older graves.

I cannot find the groundskeeper. I cannot even find the path we took. But near the last pool of lamplight, I see a small headstone with my name.

Eight years old.

I kneel, careful of my leg, and place the daisy beside the first flower.

“I remember you,” I whisper.

Then I leave her there, not because she matters any less, but because I am still alive.

On my way out, I glance back once toward the darkness where the grave marked thirty-one waits.

I don't know who I will be when I return.

For the first time tonight, I want to find out.