I know that I've been going on about being more positive around here, but that's not really being authentic. I have been having a hard time emotionally, and it's really not in me to thing of pleasant or informative things to write about. Thankfully, the name of this blog is "First Person Narrative" and as such, I feel that I am able to forego actual blog posts for a while and just share some of my writing with you.
In March, I shared with you an excerpt from a larger essay I wrote about going home and visiting the cemetery. Over the next two weeks, while I do some serious self-care, I am going to share the rest of this story with you. I hope you enjoy it.
xo,
Uranium J
Click here to read the first part of the essay.
Click here for Part 2.
Click here for Part 3.
Click here for Part 4.
Click here for Part 5.
Click here for Part 6.
Part 7
After I passed their grave I walked straight back to the far side of the cemetery, stopping at the fence that didn’t used to be there and walking to the right along it until I came to the grave of John Mathis. John Mathis was someone who I had never known but who I used to always visit when I was at the cemetery. I hadn’t been to see him in ten years or more.
He was a boy who had been in the marching band several years before me and who had played the same instrument I did: The trumpet. He was very smart, had a scholarship to a great school, and everyone had nice things to say about him. I always got the idea that he was the all American Boy Scout that every mother secretly hopes her little man will some day become.
He died a little before my dad, and their tombstones were only a few steps away from one another. After my dad died, John Mathis and I became friends because I could deal with a young man I had never known a whole lot better than I could my dad. Being boy crazy at the time, John Mathis and I had a scenario as well, although I can’t remember a whole lot about it right now. I’m pretty sure that it involved roses and me having a car.
I was always more interested in putting flowers on John Mathis’s grave than on anyone else’s. I thought it might comfort his mother to see flowers on his grave from someone she didn’t know. Or maybe I just liked the idea of having a dead boyfriend. What’s more romantic than that in a totally Goth way?
I never did give him any flowers though. As a matter of fact I never put flowers on anyone’s grave. There’s a part of me that talks to tombstones when I am wandering around in the cemetery. That’s the part of me that apologizes when I was walking over someone’s mortal remains. The part of me that skips from head stone to foot stone to plot marker in order to not step on someone out of “respect”. I think this is just some custom I learned from someone somewhere along the way and it’s become so engrained in my being that I can’t not do it.
There’s another part of me though, that knows no matter how much I want there to be a place in the ether where all the people I love are gathered and where I will someday join them in the sweet by and by, that place is not six feet under. There is nothing beneath those headstones but dirt and wood and bones. They cannot hear me. They do not care if I step on them and they don’t care if I put flowers next to a piece of granite bearing their name or if I don’t even slow down as I drive past.
But I care, and tomorrow I am going to buy flowers.
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