Part I

These cemeteries, these obscure places where we bury a nosey basset hound, what do they give to the living? Do they exist solely to respect and honor the dead? I think not.

Three years ago on a grey day in March, Iarrived at a small obscure public cemetery named Homewood Gardens.  Entering the run down administrative shack, I gave the name I was searching for: Josephine Jensen. And, after a belabored scouring through, misplaced computer files, the woman answered with nearly imperceptible contempt. “Oh, she’s in plot G, no wonder we couldn’t find her.”

In our cars, I following her on a battered road through rolling hills, passing headstones intended to only lie flat on the ground, or barely rise above it.  It was an aged and tired place.

It was three weeks earlier that I had been in Ricolleta, where rich, powerful and famous Argentinians are laid to rest near the heart of Buenos Aires: industrialists, presidents, generals and writers.  It was not a place for the poor, the powerless, or the common. It was a miniature city of mausoleums spaced end to end, designed by famous architects, who for centuries carved limestone and marble, cast gold and bronze and set incredible mosaics.  Ricolleta is a city of the dead, with named streets that have signs guiding where to find these incredible monuments, all
surrounding a beautiful and tranquil park. The address, and then the name and accomplishments of the occupants now permanently cast in bronze near the front door of every structure.

It was summer in Buenos Aries–warm, clear, welcoming.  People sat in cafes while a police band assembled to play a concert outside the gates of the littlecity.  Sitting on a folding chair, waiting, I knew that everything that existed within those gates was created not only to remember the dead, but to glorify them, these famous and rich people who were no longer capable of walking the streets of a living city.  This opulence of architecture captured the profound need to express their lives as monumental—now no longer in flesh and words, but in bronze and gold.  ike in
the great living cities, the architecture cries out: “Look at us. Look at our cities built; our wars won; our industries; our culture—look at our power; look at our charity.”

 

Now, as we approached Plot G through the damp air, there I was confronted by an enormous and unwelcome layer of new earth, still grey, still unsettled over what once restful. It was an awkward mound, dumped over the trees, grasses and graves of the past dead, creating another layer for the newly dead and burying even more the buried.  The headstones that had been once standing were removed and thrown against a fence to make room for this new earth for the new dead. Climbing to the plateau, I realized that it didn’t matter; it would never have been possible to place these headstones back where they belonged. No one ever intended to put them make, it would have been impossible anyway.

The woman from the administrative shack walked forward, then to the side, looked around the plateau of the unmarked mound, stomped her feet after a moment and said, “Here.”

“How do you know?”

She said, “I know.”

I asked if there was a marker, or a post, maybe a fence or even a tree.

“No.”

“So, how do you know?”

She said, “I just know.”

 

 

Part II:

Plot G is a pauper’s grave, a place where wevbury our lost and forgotten, where the unclaimed are dropped in trenches twenty-four at a time in county-provided plywood boxes.

In Ricolleta, I wondered why it was so necessary for whatever the dead had in life to continue. What reason was there that the fame, the power, the wealth so powerfully symbolized that it must remain in the consciousness of the living, the consciousness of those that visit in the park and sit on its benches.  And I wondered then why their lifetime was not satisfying enough, not complete enough, recognized enough, that such monument, such architecture, and cities devoted solely to the dead became so necessary. I could not avoid the sense that there existed a lack of satisfaction, a nearly desperate need for these people, or the people knew them, or the culture knew them, to build monuments to themselves that would continue to exist beyond the lifetime of the person buried within it. I could not avoid the sense that within their lifetime, no matter how glorious, no matter how rich, no matter how famous they were, it was a life for them not yet lived enough. Maybe the answer is simple. If they
believed their life, or some aspect of their life, would exist beyond the duration of their life, then what I thought was necessary to be accomplished
within that lifetime was for them not necessary.  If they believed that at end of the life was not the necessary end of what their life could complish, then it becamenecessary that it was so. It became necessary that such that whatever it was that needed to be represented after life, was represented, and that these places, like Ricolleta exist as much for that reason as any other.

The county’s computer had produced a simple piece of paper giving her name, Josephine Mary Jensen, the date of burial and the date and the cause of death: hanging.  She took her life at the age of 58–five years after the younger of her two sons died from an overdose at the age of 29, a few days before Christmas.  After the funeral of her younger, she never heard from her older son again. And after she died, it took over two months for the county to accumulate enough corpses to fill the 24-body minimum, so she was finally buried together with 23 people she had never known, in Row I, Space 9 of the now new upper level of Section GGSam. It was a mass burial which occurred on October 19th, 1995—17 years ago.

I presumed that the other 23 people buried there, one way or another, lived lives not too much different than that of Josephine.  Somehow in the grand shuffle of things, the roll of the dice, the turn of the card,  they missed out and one event lead to another and then the events  grew beyond them, until at the final moment when there was nothing there, no one there.  And I guess of anyone I should understand that. I witnessed it all myself. I was there five years before, at the funeral, watching my brother buried, then turning and walking away for the last time. I do understand the reasons I needed to walk away from my mother, although I will never understand the circumstances that first gave rise to those reasons. Never.  But I do also understand that as abandoned as her life became, as desperate, as forgotten and so much lost of meaning, or just so simply lost of anything–that still the greatest thing I can ever think of, the greatest thing I know, she created. I thank her for that life I have, as I hope that from what we can perceive as nothing that we learn to always find something, and that we realize what must be valued is somehow and
in some way buried deep within that which we otherwise find as meaningless.

These monuments we visit, these empty graveyards, these family dumps found on a salt farm in Maine, remind us not only of the necessity to live but also the way to live. They remind us to not-too-much fill our lives with the pursuit of the material, the vanity of recognition, or the fleeting illusions of power or fame; just  as they caution us away from an empty and forgotten life, the loveless life, the life which abandons and then is later abandoned.   These reminders, when brought into harmony with one another, encourage us down the path of living less inside ourselves and less focused on the objects we build and acquire, while at the same time they encourage us to be more engaged and aware of the people, the creatures and the beauty that was created around us, as we were created to live surrounded by.  So on this beautiful autumn Sunday, I ask you to leave this place, re-enter your world and spin a web of words and acts of kindness–learn more to forgive; spin a web that loves– learn more to love, spin a web that saves a life–give of yourself to the aid of others; spin a web that creates and nurtures a life–relish and nurture your family and friends; and, spin a web that senses all things created outside of us as beautiful and meaningful and so much worthy of living life for.  Love everyone, everything and mostly yourself.

Amen.

++

 

 

Part 1: A Plain Paper Card

Inside my desk there’s a tattered card. It’s made of thin paper that’s been folded, and the outside flap has been printed:

The family of

 

acknowledges with grateful appreciation

your kind expression of sympathy

The inside has no printing. But unlike on the outside, the obvious blank on the inside is filled in by hand and black ballpoint pen, as it was intended to be.

 

12-26-92

Thank You for coming

to see Eric.  George

Please call Me

      286-7876

Mother

 

Had there been no need for the card, he would have been 46 this past Wednesday, and at that still my younger bother, the baby my mother thought of as innocent and maybe a little too fragile in this too scary world that she brought him into. I don’t know if it was that, or just something else that made it impossible for him to face the Christmas before his 30^th birthday–the last Christmas of his twenties–the last time he could believe himself deserving of that impunity that comes to us only because we are young. Or maybe it was the other way around, and in that awesome clarity of intuition that seems come only to women, and more often to mothers, she saw something ahead of him that he was bound to run into. They said it was toxemia, an accidental death from too many drugs. I never thought of it much as an accident. He told me once earlier that the number of drugs he had taken would have killed me.

Part II: An Electrical Cord

We grew up in Humboldt Park in the sixties a couple of blocks from the Our Lady of Angles Elementary School. It had burned just a little before we moved there. The catholic parents, Italians, Poles and Czechs, wouldn’t look at you when they talked about it. In the alley other kids told us that the nuns told the little children before they perished to pray instead of run, and that God would protect them.

We were poor enough then to expect our clothes to come in a cardboard box from the lady across the alley, and to never much see a beach or go on a vacation. I bought my first bicycle with money I made from turning in empty beer bottles for a penny or two. They were left behind by the smelly men that my step-father took in to sleep our couch.  It was the place that I learned the kind of economics they couldn’t teach me latter: how to take nothing and make it something, and how to take something and make it something more.

When the coffee percolator cord needed to be replaced my mother sent me to the dime store. I stood over the choices pondering the lengths and prices, and calculating the longer cords were less money per foot. She knew I was a careful guardian of her money; she knew without exception that she could trust me to make the right choice. The six foot cord only cost a little more than the two and four cords, but could free up an already too small counter. It was a brilliant analysis of absolute price, unit price and consumer utility. I picked it up proudly and started walking to the cash register when I another thought came to my mind: why I was there in the first place, and how it came to be broken. It’s not that we didn’t deserve punishment, in many ways we were ordinary boys and we did things that ordinary boys did back then. We had our share of firecrackers, fistfights and name calling. We once started a fire in the bushes behind the Baptist Church on the corner, where she sent us for Bible School on Sundays. We put it out by the time it started to scare us  I once smacked a baseball so hard and straight that the pitcher’s mouth was covered in blood—but even then they said it wasn’t really my fault. Except for a giant M-80 that tore up our faces one July 5^th morning, the worst thing we did was call the old next door landlord a Pollack–even though we were technically Pollacks ourselves.

But there was something about the cord that seemed wrong even then, like it wasn’t something that you used to teach somebody something, but just something you used to hurt them. There was something bad about it, and cruel, and it scared me deeper than just how bad it hurt.  It was that something that made me turn around and go back for the two foot cord. It was the first time in my life that I went against someone that I should have listened to. Two or three days later when she realized it was too short to fold over like the old cord,  she grabbed it by little prong end, leaving the heavier plastic part to swing free. Then she swung it at me, and plastic part swung around and banged her elbow. It made me smile inside. From then on she never tried to hit us with that cord again.

I guess in some way it was already too late, and many years later about a year after my stepfather left, I left too. I was seventeen. Before that I called our natural father who lived in Indiana, but visited on Sundays. I told him that we couldn’t live like this anymore and that he had to take my brother and get him away from everything that was around us then—I wanted him to save Eric.

 

Part III: A Phone Call

It wasn’t that I hadn’t tried to reach her before then, but it seemed when I did nothing good came out of it. So the plain paper card sat in my desk for thirteen years until last spring when I picked up the phone to find out that she was no longer at that number. I knew a guy that knew his way around and I asked him to see if he could track her down. He called me a little before my birthday in May and told me he found her somewhere in the far south suburbs. She had been married for less than a year and was found by her new husband’s daughter some days after he had gone to the hospital for reasons that seemed mysterious.  He told me that she was buried in a public plot for people without means and didn’t have a headstone, but he refused say how she died.

In the fall, he called again and said he was cleaning out this desk and wanted to put the file away. He asked if there was any reason he shouldn’t. I said, you never told me how she died. He said she hung herself with an electrical cord, and that there were pictures that I didn’t want to see.

I guess there was something about that electrical cord and how it got all wrapped up in the idea of punishment for her and that no matter how she tried to move on with her life that it was only three years before that her baby son was buried,  and her only other son never called. I have come to understand all that, in a way. But what I just can’t understand is something about the cord, and what end she tied around whatever it was that she tied it to and what end she took and put around her neck, and how long it was, and whether it was folded over, and how it reached, and how in all the ways that we try to make things work and make something out of the nothing that we are given, that there are just some things that we can’t make any better than the way they started.

 

March, 2006