Category: Santiago Holmes

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.

I am on intimate terms with death. I always have been. We know each other well. I think about death and dying often. When I was younger, I used to think about dying and wonder who would come to my funeral. I’d lie awake at nights wondering who would miss me. Most evenings I couldn’t come up with many names aside from my mother.

            I’ve thought about death much more as I’ve aged. Failure after failure has left me feeling more useless, more alone, wondering what was the point of all this. It’s been the voice of my mother, her positivity, her love that has brought me back from a brink she didn’t know I was on.

            I didn’t know my father. He died before I was born. My mother told me he an important man in our town, well respected by all those who lived in my hometown of Berwick. He died in one of the fires in the old mills. Mom never explained what he was doing there. When I asked she gave vague answers. I loved my mother so I took her words as the truth. It wasn’t until much later in life that I found it odd she wouldn’t tell me his name or that she didn’t have any pictures of him.

            Along with death, I’ve thought a great deal about my father. I’ve spent hours daydreaming about who he might have been. I always pictured him as a big man, broad through the shoulders and chest, with thick arms. My mother says I resemble him a great deal, with my dark hair and crooked nose at the top of a tall wiry build. 

            I pictured him happy as he and I walk down Main Street in Berwick. He would nod to people in the storefronts we passed, and the people would tip their caps or smile back, eager to have his attention, even for a moment. His eyes were steel blue, sharp, seeing everything and so piercing; no one could look him in the eye.

            My eyes are a softer blue and mother says they are hers; the best trait she gave me. She told me my father’s eyes were hazel and sad. When she’s told me about him in the past, a sad smile takes over her face as she recounts his eyes, “they were what sucked me in; those sad deep pools I wanted to dive into and soak up the problems and hurt hidden there.”

            I couldn’t see my father as sad. He was too great a man, too powerful to feel sadness. My dreams showed him having everything he could want in the world. There was no room for sadness. But then, those were a child’s dreams.