LJ Idol S5 Topic 5: Open Topic: Go On Living

At least twice a day every week day, I pass a cemetery.

It is a tranquil, tasteful kind of place, flat, even, treeless, green ground, headstones marked with flowers. Sometimes, more often than not, there are families gathered under the green canopy laying a loved one to rest.

My breath hitches and I say “Oh” out loud.

I want to reach out to them, I want to touch my hand to their faces; I want to wrap them in my arms.

I make up stories about the ones they’ve laid to rest. I scan the faces of the grievers briefly and I ask them if they are the ones that are going to show their true colors or if they are the ones that will come back on birthdays, on anniversaries and lay flowers. I hope that the ones left behind will be okay and that there is very little drama and they don’t wind up on the floor very often.
 

Two hundred miles south, there is a graveyard on a windy hill that overlooks a dairyfarm.

When the wind is right, the scent is comforting; it is childhood; it is home. There are plots of vaults, towering oak trees, pink camellias and cape jasmine. There are graves there almost two hundred years old.

I stop there on the way out of town, pulling off the interstate, turning onto red clay. Sometimes, I just sit in my car, yards away from his resting place. I look at the flowers my family has left there, the headstone next to his with my grandmother’s name on it. How must it feel to still be breathing and know that is your place?

Other times, I walk up to the foot of his vault, sweep the leaves away and ask him how we ever got here. He hasn’t ever answered. Perhaps I should stay longer.

 

The hardest part is the living.