My Father's New Community

As a writer and a reader, I have always been most interested in explorations of place and community, and the way a community affects individuals. I guess that explains why I wrote an entire book based around one community. What I hadn't considered before my father died was how much a cemetery is an extension of the larger community, especially a small pioneer cemetery in a tight-knit community like the one we live in. Some of my dad's new neighbors have been there since the 1800s, when the town was first founded. He's about two hundred yards from a Nobel Prize winner, as Linus Pauling is buried just up the rise from Dad.

But it's Dad's immediate neighbors whom I find most interesting, and I find solace in the fact that I knew, or knew of, many of them. Just above my father's plot is a peaceful maple tree, under which lies the grave of his father, Morris Minor. There are two plots next to Grandpa's that will someday be home to my grandmother and my aunt.

Just to the right of their plots are the graves of Marylisa and Sam Dickason. Marylisa was a friend of my mother's, and her son, Sam, was the same age as my younger brother, Quinn. Quinn and Sam used to play together in elementary school. I remember Sam as an adorable dark-haired boy who always wore a magician's cape and loved to show us his latest tricks, be it rabbits out of hats or disappearing face cards. When Sam was in junior high school, their family decided to go horseback riding on a vacation and Marylisa's horse bucked her off, right into a wall. The head injuries proved fatal. Sam and his brother were left with a stepfather and a hole in their lives that could never be filled. We never saw that twinkle-eyed magician again; each time I saw him in high school, he was a darker, confused looking boy. Several years ago, when taking a spray of flowers to my grandfather's grave on Memorial Day, we noticed a new grave next to Marylisa's with Sam's name on it and a poem that indicates an end to emotional suffering, with a line to the effect of "safe in mother's arms at last." I heard a rumor that his death was the result of a suicide, but I don't know if that's true. What I do know is that the loss of his mother at such an early age must have changed the trajectory of his life forever.

Toss a stone to the right further, and you'll hit another pair of headstones: the husband and son of a woman I've known for years (I'll call her Maggie). There was a mystery surrounding one of those stones, because Maggie didn't tell anyone in the community that her son was suffering through the final stages of the AIDS virus, afraid of the backlash that might occur if the facts of her son's sexuality became public knowledge. Before he died, he designed his own headstone, a beautiful, abstract piece of art that conveys a strong sense of the kind of person he must have been. When Maggie's husband died, he was buried next to his son.

Jack is buried a few plots downwind. My friend Rinda met Jack volunteering at a nursing home; he was an elderly man who had been a resident there for years and was a ward of the state. As she got to know Jack, she learned that he had gone from institution to institution his entire life, and that he'd never actually had a family. In his eighties, Jack's lifelong dream for a family came to fruition when Rinda legally adopted him into her family. He died shortly thereafter, and they buried him in the Pioneer Cemetery after the kind of touching memorial service that makes you want to do more good in this world.

And now my dad is a member of this community. It's a community each of us will join someday, this community of the dead. I don't know a lick about the afterlife, if there is one, but I do know this: the stories we leave behind, the lessons our lives have to offer, will outlive all of us.