Fragments From Floyd

Our first country home shared a border with church yard and its cemetery. We were assimilated into that little church as members, even though most of the congregation consisted of four or five extended families living in the area for generations. Over time, we came to recognize the family names on the grave stones and connect them with living church members. In a few more years, we knew the person that had been buried under the fresh dirt over by the maple tree; we had sat behind them in church the week before and watched from our barn while the back hoe made a place for their bones. Some stones bore names and birth dates only. The granite surface was ominously smooth where the date of death would some day be chiseled in the standing stone. One day I was out in my vegetable garden bent over hoeing potatoes, and looked up. A person I recognized was in the cemetery, silhouetted against the sky, standing at the foot of their own grave. I knew that they were pondering the polished rock, wondering what date would appear there some day to mark the day of their death. It could be tomorrow. Just like that.

Our son's favorite climbing tree was on the edge of the graveyard. For hours I watched him play happily above the dead. This cemetery, like most, was a still and very quiet place. On that rounded knoll by the little brick church I once guessed that the view took in more than three hundred square miles. The scene spread in all directions, out and down. Below and far away, the angular shapes of church steeples and silos accented the smooth smear of clearings; wooded ridges brooded over pastures dotted with black and white cows. Ridge after ridge receded in paler shades of blue and gray into the distance to the horizon, and in the lowlands ragged mists often rose from countless creeks, lifting like prayers, carried off slowly by soft winds. In winter and summer, snow and storm, I watched the world from that high place.

From that ridge pricked by stony markers of known and anonymous lives, I shouted for joy with raised arms for the glory of the good earth at sunset. And from that same ridge in a cold rain I wailed into the wind and shook my fist at God in the deepest agony I have ever known, grieving and in pain from unjust or self-inflicted wounds that would not heal. It was as if the presence of death all around me made every countenance of life more poignant and more real in that place of death. It was as if the story came together-- the comedy or the tragedy-- when the last chapter was known and so very near, under my feet. All this suffering, and I will die. All this beauty, and then still I will surely die. There among the dead-- not the abstract dead but the dead with faces-- a person is forced to confront the last chapter of the story and consider what can be made of those precious lines to be written between the now and that certain end.

I had thought then that I wanted to be buried in that graveyard just up the hill from our first country place on that windswept hill of tears and joy, of endless vistas and impenetrable fog. Now, I am not so sure. I haven't given much attention to the matter of the disposal of my body or my ashes. The 'where' will be no matter to my spirit that will be occupied after death elsewhere with higher things. Still, for the sake of those who might visit some simple marker (my only wish is that it NOT be polished but rough so as to be a ready surface for lichens) I want the final resting place of my borrowed matter to be a beautiful place for them. The soft humus below a certain rock outcrop at the end of our valley will be my cemetery-- a moss-covered rock comfortable to sit on, a place under arching basswoods and tulip poplars near enough to Nameless Creek that they can hear in its waters my voice and laughter. There they may reflect back on the joy and peace I knew among those hills. It was a remarkable and beautiful world, but it was only the beginning.

The biweekly topic at Ecotone is Cemeteries and Place. New entries will trickle in over the next week, I'm thinking.