Month: April 2019

            When I was 16, my second summer working for Pap, I buried a high school classmate. LeAnn Matthews had just graduated when she was killed in a horrific automobile accident. She was the prettiest girl in town, let alone the high school. She had a big smile that lit up any room she walked into and warmed those she cast it upon. On top of that, she was a nice person, wiling to talk with anyone, while also appearing interested in what they had to say. 

She was the pride of Berwick; valedictorian of her class, a star in school plays, an All-State performer on three different athletic teams, first chair violin in the school orchestra and overall model student, daughter and human. She was headed to Cornell in the fall, the first resident of Berwick to be accepted into an Ivy League school. There wasn’t a corner of the town she hadn’t put her stamp on, so it was understandable how her death devastated the town.

She’d been headed home from the Boiler Room Bar and Grill when she struck another car head on. The Boiler Room was where all the underage and just-of-age locals went to feel like adults because of its lax ID policies – though the Tortoise had no ID policy, it was too much of a dive, even for desperate under-aged kids.

The chief of police owned the Boiler Room, and with the town’s economy being poor, he felt obligated to bring in as much business as possible. He made a convoluted argument about the more money he brought in providing more in tax revenue for the city, but most folks didn’t pay that close attention, instead preferring to have another place to drown their cares for an hour or two.

LeAnn wasn’t a frequenter of the Boiler Room, but she was there that night to celebrate her high school graduation. She hadn’t had much, but the state blood alcohol limit was 0.0 and she was over that when she got behind the wheel.

As luck would have it, the driver of the car that hit her had also been drinking. His blood alcohol was 0.8. LeAnn was stopped at a stoplight when his car crossed the dividing line, blew through the intersection and slammed her head on. His lack of sobriety was the only reason he survived, she didn’t have a chance.

Burying LeAnn was the first time I stopped and thought about mortality. It hit me hard that someone I knew was lying beneath my feet. By the time of LeAnn’s burial, I’d buried a few dozen people, and while it was strange to get outside of myself and think about standing on top of a body, at this point, I was used to the sensation. 

With LeAnn, I reverted back to the form of my first burial, where I refused to step on the dirt to help press it down. I worked from the edges and strained against the back of my shovel to pack the dirt in. It felt like a desecration to walk on top of someone I had known, but at the same time, I wanted it to be perfect. I felt a certain pride at being one of the last people to care for LeAnn on this earth.

Santiago Holmes grumbled about my performance as he stomped and spat over her grave. I was tempted to hit him with my shovel each time he spit into the dirt covering her, but I knew he wasn’t invested in the making sure the work was perfect. To him it was just a job, to me, even though I hadn’t known LeAnn to talk to beyond the quick ‘hello’ she shared with everyone, it felt personal.

If you give your mind free rein, you can see and hear strange things in cemeteries. I don’t believe in ghosts, and I didn’t back then, but the following summer I returned to work full-time in the cemetery I swear I saw one.

I hadn’t seen LeAnn Matthews’ mother visit her grave the previous summer. When she showed up to prune the flowers at the front of LeAnn’s grave the following summer, I swear I was looking at the ghost of LeAnn. She was the spitting image of LeAnn, though her long hair was grayish-white instead of blonde.

She was an acquaintance of my mother, and I had known her to have short hair and an engaging personality. Now she was hollowed out. As she worked at the stems, I could see the toll grief had taken on her. I had an urge to go to her and try to comfort her by telling her someone who knew her daughter had buried her.

Instead, I stayed back and watched as the July sun beat down on her small back and she tore at the withered petals of the flowers, her body wracked by sobs. In some sense she was a ghost, as the person I had known was nowhere to be seen in the broken woman who floated with grief back to her car.

What always struck me as strange about the experience of burying LeAnn was how I felt indifferent to her death. I hadn’t thought to care about the other people I had buried. I hadn’t known them.

I wanted to do a good job burying LeAnn. I wanted to make it perfect, but I wasn’t sad, or affected in any way by her death. It just was. I think I understood then, at a deeper level I wasn’t aware of, that people die and it’s part of life, so it wasn’t something to get worked up about.

At the same time, I worried about myself, because I didn’t feel anything. I thought, even though I didn’t know LeAnn well, I should feel something about her passing. I felt the weight of it, and by that I mean I felt other people’s sadness and the levity. Yes, this burial was more personal, but I wasn’t sad.

I was afraid I wasn’t a good person. I was scared I wasn’t normal I tried to say something to Santiago Holmes about it the next day, but he shrugged his shoulders and said, “people die, so what?” 

Working for Pap was my first job. I was 15 the summer he hired me on. It was the beginning of my relationship with death. You can’t help but get intimate with it in a cemetery; it surrounds you. Even at 15, I could feel the chill of its fingers when I was six feet down smoothing the sides of the graves.

            Even on the sunniest summer day, the feeling of being in that hole and knowing someone will be dropped in the spot your standing for eternity, well, it’s hard to explain just what it feels like. Creepy and eerie are the two words that come to mind, but I’m not sure they do it justice. It’s more a sense of foreboding and a strange realization that someone no longer living will be resting where you are standing. All I know for certain is I wanted to get out of that hole as fast as possible. 

That first summer I went home and thought about my own death every time I dug a plot. I’d spend the nights staring at the ceiling, sweating in the summer heat and wondering when I would go and how? It scared me.

I didn’t have time for fear when I was in the hole. Pap was always sitting up above in the backhoe, Camel dangling from the corner of his mouth, pointing out different spots he thought I’d missed in my efforts to smooth down the sides. It felt like torture at the time, but when I look back on it, I realize he was teaching me two lessons.

First off, he wanted it done perfect. He took pride in his work and wanted to provide the people who were buried in the cemetery and their families with a perfect, beautiful spot for their final resting place. There was no task so small it shouldn’t be executed to perfection. 

Second, and involving more extrapolation, he wanted me to take full advantage of every second of my life; live it to its maximum. I know I felt a strong desire to live after being down in the grave. It’s strange, because my head wasn’t that far from the top of the hole when I was digging and tamping, but the air felt cleaner and I felt more alive when I came up from smoothing those edges. Pap would always say, “I bet that tastes good,” when I climbed out, than chortle to himself.

            That last bit may sound clichéd, but it is the truth, and I’m sure he knew it well. He’d dug hundreds of these graves himself, burying a good chunk of Berwick over his 48 years as caretaker. It must have provided perspective and it explained some of the bitterness – putting people to rest after having watched them waste what time they had being a chief cause.

It is funny how death and time skew our memories, and allow us to create qualities in those we didn’t know well. When I was seventeen, my grandfather, Pap, died. For most of my life I had seen him as a crotchety old man, never happy, always bitter. He often complained about how unfair life was, and how it didn’t offer many fair shakes. At the same time, he seemed to shake life as hard as he could. 

            In the two plus years I had worked for him I found him to be more than what I had thought he was. He was the caretaker of the Berwick cemetery, Mt. Hope – I thought it was strange to have the word ‘hope’ in the name of a place holding such sadness. When he passed – an ugly death caused by the two-pack a day unfiltered Camel habit he had never attempted to kick – I was devastated, or at least that’s how I thought I was supposed to feel. In reality, I didn’t feel much, and that concerned me.

            When a family member passes – one who wasn’t abusive or cruel – you should feel sad. I was sad, or so I thought, but my grandfather hadn’t loved me. For the bulk of my life I felt like a burden to him, and though he viewed me as a mistake. At best, I think he saw me as a piece of ammunition he could use against my mother. This brought him great joy due to the constant battle being fought between the two; it’s cause rooted in some piece of history I was not privy too.

            I was the trump card he played when he was down, which was not infrequent. His eyes would sparkle with mean mirth when he would say something to the effect of “the boy is evidence of your inability to make good decisions,” which would cause my mother’s eyes to flash with anger, as my grandmother would tell him to hush and my face would burn with embarrassment. Before we lived with my grandparents, if we were visiting, we would leave right after that jibe.

            As time has subsided, I’ve forgotten most of the hostility and resentment surrounding my grandfather. He’s been dead almost 25 years and my mind doesn’t have the room to carry anger for someone so long past. Death and time: the perfect combination for forgetting.

            I remember more the two plus years I spent working for him. They are happier memories, which no doubt confuses the memory of how I felt at his death. I will always see the mirth in his eyes as he sat smoking in the backhoe asking how the view was every time I was six feet down in a grave, and I can still hear the scratchy laughter as he said it was a preview of what was to come.

He still carried bitterness and anger, but when I do remember them, I hear them in the context of the lessons he imparted. Though I don’t think they were intentional, they were well learned. 

            He taught me hard work, stubbornness, tough love (yes, love) and the importance of doing good work. I learned how to swear and how to blend in as one of the guys. The two-and-a-half summers I worked for him were the best summers of my life.