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?”
