I have been walking through a cemetery more than usual lately.
It is a tiny postage-stamp patch of ground tucked inside a forest, surrounded by million-dollar mansions that crowd close to the dead. The cemetery rolls over soft hills with narrow, winding roads. Trees outnumber the tombstones. A couple ponds sit still as glass. Only disturbed with an occasional curious mallard. Creeks trickle through, making a soft babble under the chilled breeze. Some of the people buried there have been resting here for a century. Others just got settled in the ground this year. The Irish rest beside Germans. The Jews beside Italians. Plenty of other Europeans, and a few Orientals mixed in too. Death doesn’t discriminate, it files us alphabetically by plot number and leaves the rest to the visitors to determine.
I was there yesterday under a dull November sky. Most of the trees were plain skeletons, bare branches clawing into the grey. The last drops of autumn still clung to a few stubborn twigs, little teardrops refusing to fall before the winter frost.
The grave that brings me back isn’t my Oldman’s or my Ma’s. It isn’t anyone with Shepley blood in their veins. It is the man who raised the woman who once loved me, the woman who made me a father three times over... My father-in-law.
A man who welcomed me into his family, handed me his daughter’s heart, and in return got his first grandchild. That connection never broke, even after the marriage did. That is why I have been visiting his graveyard more often. Love doesn’t end just because the paperwork changes.
It is also a damn fine excuse for a long walk and a cigar. I usually bring him a drink so we can share one more together. Yesterday it was Guinness. Other days it has been bourbon, and sometimes vodka. His preference when the living days still mattered.
I often leave a cheap thirty-nine-cent plastic comb. He insisted on keeping that comb-over neatly tucked when he walked this earth, so I figure he might need to keep it tidy in eternal rest as well.
Tucked tightly to his right is a famous Chicago hockey player. His stone is covered in weather-worn pucks left by the faithful. A shrine built out of vulcanized rubber and memories from the Madhouse on Madison.
On a recent visit I found the resting place of a dear friend’s family. His mother, gone just before the millennium. His father, a few years back. And his brother, the sibling whose time was far too short. Someone placed a little duck statue at the child’s stone. Childhood frozen in ceramic.
I brushed off their headstones, cleared the leaves, and had a Guinness with my buddy's father. Then I walked back across the rolling ground to finish my cigar beside my father-in-law.
There weren’t many visitors that afternoon. Those who were there became an unwilling audience to my trading pit voice drifting through the trees. I said a couple Hail Mary's out loud. When I finished an Our Father, a cold rush went through me, the kind that somehow carries security.
A strange joy only cemeteries can give.
I sang a little Sinatra. I even gave the Talking Heads a run. When I passed by a Jewish headstone, I sang Sunrise, Sunset from Fiddler on the Roof. I ended with The Parting Glass near an Irish grave.
Before I left, I told Mr. Bergmann I would be back in a couple days. Maybe with a Thanksgiving mimosa. Standing there, with cigar smoke still curling above the grass, I recited the little phrase from Looking Glass PopPop loved to repeat whenever a sleepy Shepkid flopped face-down on his belly. I left the last inch of the cigar at his stone so he could enjoy the smell with the Guinness seeping into the earth.
As I walked back to the car, the thought crossed my mind. This wouldn’t be a bad place for me to land someday. A place where the Shepkids could visit PopPop and JoJo, then stroll over and say hello to their Oldman. Maybe their mom would be close by too. At least she and I wouldn’t be fighting. The dead don’t bother with old arguments.
That reminded me of something my Oldman told me more than once: We spend so much of life fighting and hating, but in the end we all wind up together in heaven, where none of that garbage is f'ing allowed. Maybe we should practice loving each other now, so it feels natural when we get there.
Alright, you Chalkheads, go live your life with gusto today. Enjoy the Thanksgiving week ahead. Make the miles mean something before you sleep.
Lewis Carroll, from Through the Looking-Glass.
“The time has come,” the Walrus said,
“to talk of many things:
Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax —
Of cabbages — and kings —
And why the sea is boiling hot —
And whether pigs have wings.”
