standing feature
north face
An eye on the grave
Last week, we followed a thunderstorm into the old cemetery in Clinton. We drove past the All-You-Can-Eat-BBQ-Buffet at the RV park, where a man in a white cowboy hat sat strumming his guitar, his mournful songs following us up the cemetery hill.
There were pioneers resting here, whose plows and bedclothes we’d seen on display in the little museum down the street. Now, their families cuddled around them as the sky moved by.
We walked between these strangers’ graves, reading their names, watching the clouds.
And what was startling was all the children buried here—even babies, who died the same year they were born.
The gravestones read:
“ A Child is Lost. A Cherub is Born.” And “Little Bud of Love. 1967 – 1967.”
And I thought of how we come into the world with such hope.
How my father used to lift me high into the air, and I would stretch out my arms to fly, laughing like an angel.
How my father would bounce me on his knee to the beat of a German nursery rhyme “Hoppe, Hoppe Reiter”—the rhyme in which a horse rider falls into the ditch and cries out and is feasted on by ravens. And my father would drop me down between his knees, always catching me before I hit the ground.
Still, I grew up with one eye on the grave.
My parents’ plot was already picked out and paid for, although they were both still spry.
And I was asked as a child to write down plans for my funeral, because you never knew what was coming next.
The first dead person I ever saw was my German grandmother. Her lips were black and she looked very still.
My grandmother was once a gymnast. Then she had a stroke and came to live with us. She lay paralyzed in a bed where our dining room table used to be. She cried “No, no, no” in her language for hours.
Her good arm she would lift above her head, up and down, up and down. She had beautiful blue eyes and very white hair and a lime-green housecoat. She lay in the dining room and screamed “No!”
That year, my sister and I took kung fu classes so we could defend ourselves from whatever was out there. Also, we wanted to meet boys. We came home with our arms covered in bruises from blocking kicks and punches.
We would practice our kung fu moves in the living room. My grandmother thought we were dancing. She smiled and moved her good arm in time to the music.
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