Minnie Turns 152. Emily Turns 41.

Trigger Warning: Loss / Cemeteries

Yesterday afternoon, on my 41^st birthday, I meandered into the cemetery across the street. It’s a place I’ve frequented during the pandemic, drawn by some insatiable quest to replenish, to carve out quiet and solitude away from foot traffic and blaring car radios. Maybe to hide from all the bad news.

            A cemetery may sound like a rather macabre place to spend an hour of one’s birthday, but I find it’s one of the few spaces that imparts instantaneous perspective, whether it’s the open sky, the vigor from exercise, or the innumerable gravestones. It’s hard to feel as though you lack the upper hand when you’re the only living, breathing human around. And yesterday, I needed that. To look out, rather than in.

            Birthdays like New Years’ can be tethered to the expectation of celebration and merriment and yet, as I grow older, both occasions seem to deliver more wistfulness and nostalgia for the years that came before—for the moments and crossroads that cannot be revisited, let alone reshaped—than for anticipation of what lurks around the corner.

            As author Robert Dugoni writes in his best-selling novel, The Extraordinary Life of Sam Hell, “There comes a day in every man’s life when he stops looking forward and starts looking back.” The same may be true for us women, except we’re surely multi-tasking as we peer into the rearview.

            According to a 2019 NCHS study, the life expectancy of a female in the US was 81. COVID has slashed that by nearly 2 years. So, at 41, who’s to say whether there’s more sand above or below me. To presume flirts with arrogance, but it’s also downright foolish. Regardless, I awoke yesterday with a vexing weight in my chest. A case of the doldrums. I drank my tea before tending to the trash littering our driveway: a swell of crumbled wrappers, rotten tomatoes, blackened banana peels, and soggy paper towels that the raccoons had ransacked and then urinated on during the wee hours. As I brushed scurrying ants from my wrists, I tried not to dry-heave. Afterwards, I showered, changed, and smiled at the texts streaming in on my iPhone. I replied with hearts and blowing-kiss emojis, lest I seem ungrateful. And I was grateful. I am grateful. I was humbled by every phone call and Facebook message, but my melancholic pall only persisted. 

            By mid-afternoon, disgusted with my own moping, I buckled my ultra-cool Fanny Pack around my waist, the one I stole from my daughter’s parade bag one 4^th of July when the local librarians lobbed 1980’s belly pouches at the crowd instead of Tootsie Rolls. I tied up my sneakers, secured my earbuds, and set out in spandex for the cemetery.

            The circuit takes me around 50 minutes to complete if I power walk, a calculation that is important to bear in mind, given that the caretaker locks the imposing iron gates promptly at 17:00 hours, regardless of the souls (dead or alive) trapped inside.  

            Typically, I head south, striding past the entrance statue, two stone hands raised in prayer, and continue down a shaded road lined with Elms to section 21—the most tender part of the route, marked with a meager sign that reads, “Babyland”. Only once did I wander among those 100 or so grave markers. To do so again, would be wrenching and I’m simply not brave enough. Most of the infants and toddlers buried here died in the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s. The majority have the same year etched on either side of their respective dash, some with teddy bears and pastoral lambs carved onto the rockfaces.

            One weekend last winter, after an impressive Chicago blizzard, I’d trudged through the cemetery’s crudely plowed streets. Salt pellets had rendered the roads passable, although tire treads and footprints had turned the slush a dingy, ashen gray. But beyond the road, virginal snow shrouded the grass and graves for several weeks, undisturbed and beatific like a white blanket of wool. I could almost pretend those little grave markers weren’t there, tucked in under the elements—that all those children had in fact survived and grown up to be engineers and meteorologists, parents and world travelers.

            Further down the pot-holed road hangs a sign that reads, “Select Singles”, which never fails to make me cringe. It seems a strange, borderline inappropriate way to label this sectioned-off parcel as though it is facilitating some sort of afterlife dating pool. Beloved sister. Dear Aunt. Dad. I wonder about these strangers, worry they died alone, worry that all of their possessions were emptied into a dumpster after poorly-attended funerals, certain that For Sale signs were staked in their front lawns while any surviving pets were relegated to shelters. I can only hope these “select singles” aren’t shaking their heads, lamenting about their first edition Steinbeck novels that ended up in garage sales or their cash-stuffed tin cans still buried under backyard peach trees.

            From Bachelorville, I cross the bike path that bisects the cemetery and approach one of the older sections. I pass the Schroeder family plot where Robert and Martha, born in the mid-19^th century, are buried with their five children, none of whom survived past their twentieth birthday. I pass Mabel Bott’s rose-hued granite headstone and August Horn’s deteriorating grey one, buckling from the protruding roots of an ancient Oak. I pass Charles and Emma Shoup who died in 1920, one month apart, and Otto and Mary Priebe’s cylindrical headstones that resemble logs around a campfire. I smile at Bertha Blessing’s headstone, one of my personal favorites. She lived to be 86 and I’m convinced she was enchanting with a name like Bertha Blessing. A doting grandmother who smelled like honey drops and freshly baked bread.

            Most of the people in this section never made it to 50, let alone 81, having been born into the world before antibiotics or chemotherapy, a time when contracting strep throat or stepping on a nail could be your ultimate demise. While my feet shuffle forward, I conduct mental math, pondering what caused each person’s passing. It dawns on me that my walk is no different than my mother’s enigmatic obsession with newspaper obituaries. Although, I can’t recall if she admits to feeling invigorated or beholden when she discovers the deceased is older or younger than her.  

            At the crossroads, I choose left and I’m doused in afternoon sunshine. My bare skin drinks it in like lemonade. The days are getting shorter and soon I will be treading this path bundled in fleece. There are fewer trees on this side and after a long summer, the grass is brittle and yellow in patches. My gaze drifts several rows ahead where in August 2020, I encountered a shiny mylar balloon tied to a stake, blowing in the breeze. Happy 40^th was spelled out in oversized red letters. Curious, I’d crept up to the stone marker and furrowed my brow. Camilla Voss. August 2, 1980 – November 19, 2008. She’d died twelve years prior but someone was still bringing her balloons. She would’ve been 40 that year, just like me. The balloon is long gone now, but the plastic garden stake remains, sticking out of the earth like a stem without a flower.

            When I reach the perimeter, I round the southeast corner where on the other side, empty El trains wait their turn to pick up passengers bound for downtown. A few months prior, lightening split an Elm down the middle with the precision of a lumber jack, leaving behind a stump that is worthy of The Giving Tree. Beyond the stump, obscured by a thicket of bushes, vehicles whiz by along six lanes of the Eisenhower. Every so often, random bursts of country or heavy metal music emanate from stereos. I turn the volume up on my earbuds to drown out the ambient hum and kick the acorns out of my way. 

            Half-way down the road, I admire my favorite tree from afar, the sugar maple I stood beneath one warm day last fall when the wind was coaxing the scarlet leaves from their branches. I’d raised my arms and the leaves whirled around me like confetti, a kaleidoscope of reds and oranges and corals so vibrant that I felt as though I’d beckoned a sunset. In the shade of that tree, is a porcelain image of George T. Walzak, a young soldier in his WWII army uniform, who died at the age of 90 in 2010. His gravestone bears the epitaph I find etched over and over throughout the cemetery. Psalm 23: “The Lord is my Shephard; I shall not want.”

            Maybe that’s my problem, I think. I do want. I want a whole lot.

            By the time I reach the western edge, I already smell the river. Dank and earthy. Like an upturned wood pile. As I veer right, the pavement is almost always damp and snippets of flowing water are visible through the chain link and under bush. The river is maybe 60 feet across and more brown than blue. Truthfully, in direct sunlight, the surface appears almost green, the shade of baby food pouches that adulterate perfectly delicious fruit with spinach. At the next clearing, I pause to listen to the frogs and wait until a serpentine stick floating downstream disappears from view.

            Once I zig-zag over the bike path, I’m ¾ of the way through my route. I stare out at the menagerie of headstones and pointy obelisks, stretching skyward, and I wonder what some of those men might have been compensating for. I think of the poor doctor who commissioned his own mausoleum just around the bend. William Molden, whose wife Lina died in childbirth, leaving him with a son who ended up dying in infancy five months later. Exquisite tragedy can be decoded in numbers. He had pedigree and money, but nothing spares a human from loss.

            Nearby, a black walnut tree has dropped a slew of fruit. The road is littered with bright green orbs so numerous it’s as though someone abandoned a pee-wee tennis lesson. But I don’t stop to admire the harvest. Instead, I am scanning for her, trying to recall where I first spotted the modest grave more than six months before while zipped into my parka, fingers tingling inside heated gloves. The slate carvings are weathered, but legible. Minnie Karner, September 25, 1869 - August 6, 1924. She’s the only one I’ve found thus far.

            Happy 152^nd birthday, Minnie. I’m sorry I didn’t bring any balloons.

            On the final stretch, I pass the open field where the Canadian geese congregate, defiling the adjacent road in excrement so I’m intentional with my steps. The geese generally ignore me or else stare on in disdain as do the occasional deer that dart amongst the gravestones, helping themselves to a Kentucky bluegrass buffet. It’s unusual if I encounter more than one or two people on my circuit. Sometimes I cross paths with a bicyclist pedaling toward the Prairie Path or a landscaper, clearing a dead tree or planting marigolds. I rarely, if ever, see anyone visiting graves and I wonder, especially with the older ones, if people still grieve for them. If a human lifespan averages 80 years, our ultimate purview is only a generation or two longer. We are mortal after all, merely passing through, borrowing the earth for a dusting of geological time. Our legacies are finite and forgettable. And while that’s sobering, it doesn’t necessarily make me sad.  

            After he died, my dad wasn’t buried in a cemetery, instead he was cremated, ashes scattered in places that constituted the fulcrums of his life. As a result, I can’t claim a formal location where I mourn him and yet, I’ve discovered I don’t need a plot of land to find or revere him. I connect with him here on this walk as much as in any quiet reflective moment. I have wondered if he is proud of me, if he finds the grandkids amusing. I’ve asked him, futilely of course, if he might grant me the privilege of hearing him speak my name one more time. Often, I catch myself trying to conjure his laugh. It’s a sound I never want to forget and at the same time I recognize, after my mother, my siblings, and I are all gone that no one will remain to evoke it.  

            As I plod along the winding driveway to the exit, I am listening to my audiobook, John Green’s Anthropocene Reviewed, and he’s talking about the concept of time and loss. He writes “I wish I wasn’t so scared all the time- scared of the virus, yes, but there is also some deeper fear: the terror of time passing, and me with it . . . I will never again speak to many of the people who loved me into this moment. Just as you will not speak to many of the people who loved you into your now.”

            I hear the heartbeat in such language, the pulse almost tangible. His words burrow into my skin and find refuge there. I recognize their meaning. His prose is so precise I can only equate John Green to a safe-cracker, listening to and sensing the give of the dial in a combination lock until . . . there, a click. And the metal latch breaks open.  

            I wonder about Minnie Karner‘s laugh. If it was high-pitched or rattled in her rib cage, causing her to keel over to catch her breath. I wonder if her husband made her laugh or her girlfriends or maybe the man she’d wanted to marry but couldn’t. I wonder if her own daughter ever tried to conjure it.

            Thinking about Minnie, how can I not feel anything but gratitude on a day where I am walking on this sacred ground, crunching tinderous leaves underfoot while she is below? In the final block before home, the shadow of an afternoon moon melds into focus like a Hidden Pictures puzzle. Minnie and I were born on the same day, 111 years apart. All of her moonrises are behind her. But my dash is open-ended. Less punctuation, more promise. My own wants, still unfurling.

 

*Note: Names have been altered to preserve privacy