Near my house there lies a cemetery. I looked up the difference between a graveyard (romantic sounding) and cemetery (industrial sounding), and found out that graveyards append churches, whereas cemeteries do not. But you can really use them interchangeably, and more or less, people won’t mind the difference.

Before I had surgery, I spent a few months walking in the cemetery every day, hoping to build up some resilience for surgery. In retrospect, I’m especially glad I did, and enough about that.

Our cemetery is a bustling place. I’ve never been in it when it’s empty (I mean, it’s full to the brim with bodies, of course). There are walkers (both the human and human+dog variety), runners, and visitors. Sometimes there are mourners.

I like walking there, amongst the family names of people I have gone to school with, spending time with the ancestors of my village. I have family buried there, and I look in on my grandmother and the Rings and my mother-in-law’s people. I see names that have vanished from every other part of the village, but live on here. I imagine what they were like. I am sad for each child’s grave, and I make sure to look at each one of them, so someone remembers them, even though I never knew them. I puzzle over the stories held between each pair of dates. I especially wonder about the double plots with only one occupant, from more than 50 years ago. Where is the other half of the pair? Did they light out for the territories and find a new love? How many gravestones bear their name? How many places are they remembered?

The gravestones are interesting, fascinating. At first, they look mostly the same. En masse, they look the same. But as I pass between them, it’s absurd to think they’re the same. The old section, with graves from the early 1800s, are a mix of granite and marble. The marble ones have been almost completely washed clean, the centuries of rain smoothing them to oblivion. Many have broken. One says, only, “JV”. Another declares “beloved mother” – the last thing remembered of a woman whose name and body has gone back to the earth. This old section is in a tree-filled corner of the cemetery. It is old and it is old. It feels forgotten. Then, startlingly, one day there was a fresh bouquet on a lichen-eaten gravestone. Someone came, and someone cared.

At the front entrance, there are swathes of families, usually with one large stone bearing the family name, and rows and rows of mothers, sisters, fathers, and brothers. These are also some of the oldest graves, but they are not like their poorer cousins, which sit under the dripping pines. These are institutions. Nearly all of them pale grey granite, nearly all of them perpetually undisturbed by visitors.

As I move throughout the cemetery, time ebbs and flows around me. Sometimes it’s the present day, with a fresh mound of dirt and a tin sign marking out a 2023 death. Sometimes, I am among people who last drew breath when I was in high school, or college, or when I moved to America. Time gets held in a cemetery, and time refuses in a cemetery. I walk past gravestones that cover no body, that are simply waiting. They are in the future. Some graves have wedding photos embedded in them. I think those are my favorite. To see a black and white photo of a couple who looks so happy, knowing that is how they’ll be remembered. Eternally young, eternally together. One gravestone is elaborately carved into a sailing ship. Another is a lighthouse. There are mausoleums of varying decadence. One couple has busts above their mausoleum of themselves. Jesus is simply everywhere. It is a Catholic cemetery, so it’s to be expected, but it’s a little much. Our village has a nunnery for nuns who have aged out of the system. It’s called a Motherhouse. It’s where they go to live out their remaining time, and then they are buried in precise rows in the cemetery. Every gravestone is identical, except for the remembrance. We also have a lot of Franciscan brothers in our village, and they, too, have several large sections where they rest.

Prior to living where we live now, I’d not spent much time in cemeteries. Just for the usual reasons, I suppose. Now I can’t really imagine not being there every day that I can. It’s a friendly place, though quiet. A hushed catalog, an outdoor library of humanity. I feel fortunate to spend time there. And so I walk and dream of those who surround me.