As the summer sadly wanes and the air picks up the northern chill, I think of my father and the Mid-December day I last visited him. The year’s last month, the coldest and darkest time. A pall thrown over those days, a poverty of light and warmth, the bare trees and dried leaves whisper of the pending snow. When the snow is coming, you can taste it in the air. It is a different, colder, dryer wind. It carries with it a sense of something dangerous and looming from from away. It’s a switchblade wind, it climbs inside you, and sets about to cut you.
I recall the arrogance of a comment shared from a friend that I should go and care for your grave and the comedy of choice, that I chose visit your hole in the ground on such a raw and ugly day.
I stand the on dirt that has grown weedy and wild in the decades that have passed since you were put here. Only the stone with your name, same as my name, artistically chiseled in the granite, betrays your bones are here at all.
Staggered and cut by the cold, I try to recall the last time I came to find myself here, before your dirt. I was quite drunk and wasted on pills. Back in the wild years, I don’t recall much from those times. I’m sure I railed and swore and broke vodka bottles on your stone and cursed god, then drove away and got more drunk, a perpetual post-teenage victim. I feel nothing hallow or ghostly in this graveyard; I feel instead the edge of a cliff, where life ended too soon and death came long before it was welcome.
There’ve not been many days spent here since that day the minister said all the words about salvation and mercy and promised lands and the love of the god who could take you from me, and the first time I said the words ‘fuck that bullshit,’ out loud and got my mouth slapped for speaking my truth.
I cursed you as they lowered you into this dirt. The slap stung my face as I squinted in that early April sun, but it didn’t sting as badly as the sting of that day. It didn’t sting as badly as trying to swallow words of the preacher.
This graveyard now is an obscenity of cheap plastic flowers and fake Christmas trees, plastic statues of Jesus and baby Jesus and angels purchased at dollar stores with lights that come on as the mid-afternoon sun sets. Some kind of marvel of cheap twenty-first century solar technology and Chinese sweat shop labor, I suppose.
Shards of night race in to fill in the gaps between the elongated shadows of headstones that just moments before shined with the low and failing sunlight. The junk trinkets shine and give this lonely ground a feeling of a low budget circus.
You didn’t live long enough to see many marvels after the transistor and after all this time, I suppose, now decades later, that’s OK and the way it was supposed to be. But, I see no need to try to dress up your tomb and make it anything other than exactly what it is; a barren and stark and cold and lonesome place slowly being consumed by lichen that is working every moment to turn your headstone back to dust. When that day comes, there’ll be no one left who knows your name, or mine and I suppose that is also fitting into some grand scheme I long ago lost interest in understanding.
I can tell the friend who passed the comment I visited your bones and found everything exactly as it was and always will be.