The Cemeteries
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A few weeks ago I made a list: six cemeteries, seven stones, twelve names. I cut long sprigs of rosemary from the pot in my garden and packed them between my shirts. When I took them out, we were in Massachusetts, in my mother’s house. She cut mint and lavender from her garden while my stepfather found us some twine, and we made seven little bouquets. (It felt rude to visit and not leave a little something.) I drew a route that made a hook around the bottom of Springfield, east to west, oldest to newest.
We were in such a hurry to get going that we forgot to bring any garden tools. It wasn’t an issue until we tried to find my mother’s grandparents, whose flat headstone was, according to my grandfather, somewhere across from the office, near a statue of the Blessed Mother, kind of on a hill. We scanned the lines of sunken rectangles, scuffing away fallen leaves from overgrown names. When my sibling called out that they had found the right one, I rushed over and dropped straight to my knees to tear away thick mats of grass. My mom rummaged up a collection of tools from her handbag: a mini screwdriver, a penny, a dog tag, a Swiss army knife. My sibling and my partner and I bent over to pull away the obscuring sod, wash the face of the stone with water from the tap, dig out sand and worms from the letters of my great-grandparents’ names. My mother told us stories about them: how stubborn a patriarch Grandpa could be, how skilfully Gram sewed all his suits, how sweetly and deeply they loved each other. I thought about the giant rhubarb in Gram’s garden, where some of her ashes were scattered among her roses and irises; I thought about the engagement ring we shared, which Grandpa gave to her in a box of chocolates. When the stone was clean, I placed the bouquet upon it and my partner held me close.
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In Glasgow, I walk in a cemetery every day and no one I know or love is in it. These old Victorian graveyards are more like parks than the cemeteries I knew in Massachusetts. The forest has grown up unchecked from the graveyard’s quiet heart: knobbly-kneed pines knock down headstones, mosses creep across their backs, smooth deciduous trunks spend decades opening their mouths to swallow fallen blocks of granite. Few stones date from the last thirty or forty years, so it is a lively aberration when one stands out as lovingly tended. There is no illusion here about the durability of memory. I am quietly and persistently unsettled by how easy it is to be forgotten; I hate to think that the graves of my people, far away in another country, would look as if they too have been forgotten when I am here, alive and thinking about them.
In Massachusetts, the cemeteries are green and rolling like golf courses, with trees sternly but aesthetically kept in line. As we made our way through my list, I found it easiest to memorialise, with sympathy and empathy and forgiveness, the ones who had gardened. I have a picture of my great-great-grandparents, Grandpa's parents, standing proudly in their back garden in West Springfield, where they grew their own grapes for homemade wine, and pears and apples that they traded with neighbours for tomatoes and peppers. I have seen, on Google Street View, the porch where my other great-great-grandparents, Gram's parents, dried their beans, and the land where they kept chickens and grew vegetables. They all came from Italy to Massachusetts over a hundred years ago: the wine-making Berteras were educated and well-off, the bean-growing Polastris illiterate and poor. But they all made gardens to feed themselves and to feel at home. Knowing some of what they grew makes me feel like I know something of their pleasures, their immigrant homesickness, their fearfulness and contentment.
I have felt this too; have also used the garden to feel more at home in places where I wasn’t born. I tended their graves and crouched over their bodies in the home they came to, which they made for my great-grandparents and grandparents and my mother and now me, but I left it. I left it ten years ago and, until a few weeks ago, had not been back for five. I teased the soil from their names and thought about their pear trees and French beans in Massachusetts, and the lemons and zucchini they would have eaten in Italy, and the only thing about my life in Scotland that felt real to me were the seedlings I left on the table outside to grow bigger while I was away.
The day after my cemetery tour, the writer Page wrote movingly in her newsletter Mood Salad, “There’s not much difference between a cemetery and a garden. In a garden, we plant potential. We tussle up the soil and plant seeds, filled with divine instructions. And in a cemetery, we go through these same motions. We dig a hole, plant the casket, and wait.” I feel some kind of grief for my people that their graves are only growing grass. With their living bodies, they grew beans for the minestrone and tomatoes for the pasta, and now their bodies in the ground grow only thick sod that obscures their names. It feels like a waste of good compost. It feels like the care and gentleness in their living bodies should have had as fruitful and as meaningful a production in death. I washed their stones and fantasized about planting tomatoes and beans on top of them.
When I met an old friend in Maine, my body was still store from all the bending over. Every time I stood up or climbed the stairs or waddled out of the car, my buns protested and I thought about my people again with love and satisfaction the way I might think about the compost I had turned. I felt, in my body, the same kind of gratification as if I had made a new bed. My friend told me their brother does the same thing when he’s back in town: goes to the graves that no one else in the family ever visits and keeps them clean. I wondered out loud if it’s a kind of penance we bring upon ourselves to pay, to atone for leaving home. I can’t remember why I would have been so self-deprecating. Maybe the guilt I have about leaving home has become a shifting plate in my body; maybe just then it was pushing up a new hill of regret, a crater of homesickness. Maybe I felt that leaving the home these people made, full of the living people I love so dearly, was a kind of betrayal to them.
But this inexplicable urge to care for the graves of my people does not feel like guilt, or like penitence. It feels like care, and like gardening. I think we come back to remember our dead because going away is a kind of practice death, an exercise in seeing how everything in life moves on without you, how it could grow over the evidence you were ever there if you’re gone long enough. I can see the door closing on the memories of these people who were immigrants like me and I cannot help but rush to keep it open. I cannot help but grow pears and beans to hold it ajar a little longer.
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