My Kin Gather to Sleep at Ridgelawn Cemetery

1.

The cemeteries of America hold the bones of somewhat recent immigrants–people who go through hell just to get here, often times because they are fleeing from upheaval. From the moment they arrive, whether they know English or not, whether they understand the culture or not, they bust their backs working night and day to make a better life for themselves and their families. Sometimes they succeed. Sometimes they fail. Then they die.

Cemeteries are integrated parts of the geography and consciousness of every town. Most of us don’t think twice as we pass them. But for immigrants, American cemeteries are the ultimate reminder of the finality of their journey away from everything that was familiar to them. Death seals forever their years of fragmentation, disconnection, and yearning with an endless spool of gauze.

As Americans, we don’t understand the concept of being born and raised somewhere, then suddenly being forced to move from place to place until you die in some nondescript town thousands of miles from your home, your memories, your language, your sense of self.

When I stand at my grandfather’s grave, for example, where am I standing and what am I looking at? He was the only surviving child out of nine. His family escaped from genocide in the Ottoman Empire. Before he was 10, he had to leave school to work. As a self-educated man, he fought fascism and then communism, but really he was just fighting with his past. America did not alleviate his sense of disconnection and drift, so just to spite the system, he didn’t bother learning English or even getting a driver’s license. As a smart, talented men’s tailor, he refused to partake and thrive in the society he’d struggled to get to. Instead, he went down with the ship because he sensed that he had already drowned years ago.

When I stand at my grandfather’s grave, I am standing in the middle of happenstance. I’m looking at a past that is just as confused and lost in death as it was in life.

2.

My friend and I have a flask filled with Dewar’s. We’re going to visit our dads. His died recently and mine died over 20 years ago. They were close friends. They liked to drink whiskey and coffee, they liked to smoke, and they liked to laugh. My dad even died at their house when my parents were there for dinner one autumn night. It was as if he figured, albeit suddenly, that he might as well go while surrounded by his wife and best friends. He was young, but I think he was tired.

I unscrew the cap and take a small sip, then pass the flask to my friend. We say a toast and sprinkle some Dewar’s on their graves. A mechanic’s son and a tailor’s son. We touch their headstones and talk about how they’re somewhere now having whiskey and cigarettes. Then we go to Dunkin to get coffee, secretly wishing what we’d said were true.

3.

A couple of us are standing around a close family friend’s grave. Bright cold Sunday without rhyme or reason in Watertown, Massachusetts. Just us on a slanted hill, shivering, wondering if the buried can sense visitors. Do their atomic selves swirl around us in acknowledgment? Or are they so beyond these confines that our attempts to make sense are nothing but endearing? It’s been 40 days. She was my friends’ mother. In some ways, she was my mother too–she’d known me since I was a baby. I ate her hearty home cooking, I laughed along with her wicked sense of humor, I felt safe and loved when visiting their home. And her sons became the older brothers I never had.

We slowly walk on the snow and ice toward our cars while forcing some light-hearted comments, and we drive away. We had left the engines running.

4.

It’s 1991 and there’s a huge crowd at the part of the cemetery closest to the street. My dad’s being lowered into the ground. The priest with the lazy eye is singing and praying in Armenian. Chilly October, chilly hand after hand taking mine, saying something meant to be comforting. Many of them hug and kiss me, their breath reeking of migration and hard work. My mom is young and broken. My arm’s in her arm because I’m not sure what else to do or even what’s going on. I’m an only child and only son, so from this day forward my fortitude will be many new things other than a shy 18-year-old’s. It will be granite and iron. It will be dark clay in my throat. For years, I will stumble around, clueless about the thunderstorms inside my stupid heart. And the panic and sobbing will come at random moments when I least expect it–at a motel outside Buffalo, a truck stop in Montana, a quiet diner in New Mexico, in the car in the middle of Wyoming, the train in Glasgow, a small pub in London, my friend’s childhood home in Beirut, new year’s eve in Berlin, a red light in Los Angeles, or the 71 bus in Watertown. It will come over me mostly when I’m alone. And because my true voice and heart is choked with debris, it will take years before I allow someone even a peek inside my wreckage.

For at least a decade, I won’t visit my dad at Ridgelawn, although it’s just a five minute drive. And it’ll be even longer before I regain my sense of self and purpose. Until then, it will be all sandstorms of self-hatred and doubt. I will get used to it being 3am in some emergency room and a doctor saying, You’re fine. But can I ask, have you recently experienced something traumatic? I will want so badly to cry in those moments, to have a witness. But it won’t come. So I’ll go home and wait for morning.

5.

There’s a large nest in one of the trees just outside the cemetery. Not sure what kind of tree it is, but it’s taller than most of the others near it. I imagine a brown-grey hawk living there. I imagine it keeping guard over all these sorry plots, all our sorry lives, gliding like a drone at dawn, its feathers tousled with gratitude and joy. It doesn’t need to know or care about what death might or might not mean. When you can live at the top of a tree, when you can throw your body into the air and fly, then death can go fuck itself.