I ended up in a cemetery on a beautiful autumn afternoon because I was tired of watching a stressful football game.
So I went to visit my father-in-law.
Ed Bergmann has been resting at Bronswood Cemetery since late 2023. We called him PopPop. He was a brilliant man, and someone whose wisdom I still find myself reaching for long after he stopped handing it out.
I placed my rosary on his headstone, pulled a cigar out of my pocket, and settled in for a visit.
It wasn't my usual cigar. A friend had given it to me for my birthday, and I figured an afternoon with PopPop was as good an occasion as any to light it.
When I visit the cemetery and find myself the only living person in the neighborhood, I talk out loud.
I pray out loud.
I swear out loud.
I ask questions out loud.
…And occasionally, I get answers.
Yes, you read that correctly.
I have conversations with people who reside in heaven.
Before you start looking for a psychiatrist's phone number, understand that I know perfectly well PopPop isn't sitting behind that headstone smoking a cigar, but sometimes the people who knew us best leave enough of themselves behind that we can still hear what they would have said.
…And Ed Bergmann always had something to say.
My biggest question that afternoon was a simple one.
"When the hell can I stop worrying?"
His answer came almost immediately.
"I worried right up until my last breath."
Well, that wasn't the fucking answer I was looking for.
I had driven over there hoping for a little peace of mind, and the old man had just informed me that worrying was apparently a lifetime subscription.
Then he asked me a question.
"Do you have a roadmap in your glovebox?"
A roadmap?
I haven't carried a roadmap in my car since the Clinton administration. Somewhere along the way, Rand McNally lost its place to a voice working inside my dashboard. A stoic voice that tells me where to turn and always reminds me that I missed my exit.
PopPop wasn't talking about getting from Riverside to Bronswood. He wanted to know if I had a roadmap for my life.
Yesterday's Chalkboard was about my uncle, another one of the smartest men I have ever known. My father-in-law belongs on that same short list. Another brilliant man who had spent a lifetime accumulating knowledge. Now he is informing me that I would worry until I died and then asking me to retrieve an atlas that doesn't exist.
I am fairly certain Rand McNally never published The Life and Times of Jumbo Shepley.
If they had, it probably would have come with several pages missing, a few wrong turns, and a warning not to follow the driver's instincts after dark. But the more I thought about his question, the more sense it made. There isn't a roadmap for our lives.
We spend an enormous amount of time worrying about where we are going, whether we are headed in the right direction, and what will be waiting around the next bend. We want to know how the story ends before we have finished living the middle.
We want guarantees.
We want a clearly marked highway with rest stops, gas stations, and a big red arrow telling us we are going to be all right.
Unfortunately our personal map isn’t stuffed beneath a pile of old napkins from Parkey's and a flashlight with dead batteries.
Good luck finding your destination with a map that doesn’t exist.
Rand McNally does not print our roadmap. It is imprinted on our hearts and written into our souls. Every person we have loved, every mistake we have made, every loss we have suffered, and every unexpected kindness we have received has left a mark on it.
The roads appear as we travel them, and sometimes the roads we never wanted to take turn out to be the ones that teach us the most.
I was thinking about all of this between puffs of my cigar and Hail Mary’s on my rosary.
As the afternoon passed, my cigar grew shorter. I looked down at the unfamiliar band wrapped around what remained of it.
Printed in small letters were five words.
GOLD IS TESTED BY FIRE.
Well, I will be damned.
There is an old proverb behind those words, and its meaning reaches back thousands of years into the Bible.
In the Book of Sirach, we read that gold is tested in fire and those acceptable to God are tested in the furnace of adversity.
The First Letter of Peter uses a similar image, comparing the testing of faith to gold being refined by fire.
The ancient idea is simple. Gold is placed in a furnace because intense heat separates the precious metal from its impurities. What survives the fire is revealed to be valuable.
Human beings are not all that different.
We are tested by disappointment, heartbreak, illness, financial troubles, broken relationships, and the deaths of people who we thought would always be there.
We are tested by raising children, watching them grow, worrying about their futures, and discovering that being a parent doesn't come with an expiration date on anxiety.
We are tested by loving people we cannot protect from everything life has waiting for them, and sometimes we are tested simply by getting out of bed and facing another day.
The fire doesn't always make us stronger. Sometimes it leaves scars. Sometimes it takes things from us that we will never get back, but it can also reveal something about us that we didn't know was there.
Patience, compassion, Faith, forgiveness, and the ability to keep loving after loss.
Maybe that is the gold.
I looked at PopPop's headstone and thought about the answer he had given me.
He worried until his last breath.
Of course he did.
He was a husband, a father, a grandfather, and a man who cared deeply about the people in his life. Why would I expect someone who spent a lifetime loving his family to suddenly stop worrying about them?
Maybe worrying isn't always a sign that something is wrong. Sometimes it is simply the price we pay for giving a damn.
But there has to be a difference between caring about tomorrow and allowing tomorrow to steal the joy from today. That is probably what the old man was trying to tell me.
I can't eliminate every worry. I can't predict every turn, and I sure as hell can't unfold a map that shows me exactly where this life is taking me.
What I can do is enjoy the stretch of road I am traveling right now. I can sit in the sunshine. I can smoke a good cigar. I can say a few prayers. I can remember a man I loved and laugh at the advice I imagine him giving me, and I can accept that some of the finest things in life are temporary.
A cigar is a perfect example.
You light it knowing that eventually it will disappear. Every puff brings it closer to becoming a little pile of ash, but nobody lights a cigar hoping to preserve it forever.
The pleasure is in the smoking. The conversation, the company, and the moment.
A cigar eventually becomes ash, but the conversation you had while smoking it can last a lifetime.
As I finished mine, I looked again at the words on the band.
Gold is tested by fire.
The cigar needed fire to become what it was meant to be. Without the flame, it would have remained nothing more than rolled tobacco.
And without the fires we have walked through, perhaps we wouldn't recognize the precious things that remain in our lives.
I had arrived at Bronswood trying to escape the anxiety of a football game. I left thinking about the much bigger worries that follow me through life. PopPop didn't give me a roadmap or the answer I wanted to hear. He didn't promise me that the road ahead would be easy, and he definitely didn’t tell me that I will stop worrying.
Instead, I came away with something better.
A reminder that I don't need to know every turn in the road to appreciate the journey, and that the things worth loving will sometimes be the very things that keep me awake at night.
I said goodbye to Ed, packed up my rosary, and headed back to the car.
The cigar was gone. The afternoon was slipping away, and the shadows were bending across the gravestones.
I don't know what the hell tomorrow will bring, but I know that I enjoyed a beautiful autumn afternoon with my father-in-law…
…And for a little while, that was enough.
Okay you Chalkheads! Go find the gusto and astonishment that October 18th brings.
