Susanna at the Cemetery

The yen of some folks to mix the presence of a dead body with the innocence of a child—“Come here sweetie and kiss your Great Aunt Sally goodbye.”—is another mystery of our cultural past.

I viewed so many open caskets as a child that I thought going to funerals was what my family did on weekends. A whole generation of great aunts, uncles and distant, elderly cousins died during my grade school years, confusing me about honoring the dead. I was uneasy in the presence of crying adults to say nothing of cold flesh. I also tried to keep my distance from the casket. The yen of some folks to mix the presence of a dead body with the innocence of a child—“Come here sweetie and kiss your Great Aunt Sally goodbye.”—is another mystery of our cultural past.

At least I thought it was past, but this week in my email I opened a photo showing my nine-year-old granddaughter in a graveyard. Her other grandmother had taken her to visit the grave of her uncle, her father’s brother, who had died young. The photograph is strange and beautiful. After receiving this I was told that there was absolutely no coercion involved. In fact, it had been little Susanna’s idea to visit this grave of a young man whose death before she was born had wreaked his family, but whose memory had been kept so vividly alive that the little girl had been eager to participate in this family story.

Just as she and her Baba were leaving for the cemetery, Susanna had dashed back to collect her violin. They stopped at a nursery where Susanna chose the plants. In the photos the pink and purple flowers have been planted in front of the monument and at the side a wisp of a girl with long hair the color of wheat lovingly plays her violin. To her mind, I learned, she was playing not only for her uncle, she was playing for his neighbors under the nearby gravestones. “Do they get together and party down there?” she had asked her grandmother.

“I hope they party up there,” her grandmother answered.

This exchange made it clear to me that my granddaughter’s education was incomplete in the usual protocols of death. Souls rise, and eternal life is carried on in heaven which is either in or above the sky. The dead do not party underground. Lacking any Sunday school experience, Susanna had had to create her own ideas about death. If she had been to church, she would have learned to think about the afterlife the way most of us do.

We adults are as fanciful about death as we once were in describing birth to children—storks, cabbages, the doctor’s bag. Where babies come from had to be separated from the forbidden topic of sex. As for death we adults dress it up for ourselves with a heavenly host of angels to separate it from the forbidden topic of decay. We need heaven because we need justice: The good should be rewarded; the evil should suffer.

We make of death and the afterlife what we need them to be. This has been the way of humans since we were human. The Divine Comedy, created between 1308 and 1320, is the greatest work of Italian literature. Working in rhymed tercets, Dante Alighieri wrote an elaborate scheme for what happens when we die. He embroidered upon the Church’s three parts—Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise, to create an allegory about the soul’s journey to God as well as clearing up any doubts his contemporaries might have had about where Dante’s enemies would spend eternity.

I look again at the picture of the little girl standing under the California sun playing for her uncle and his neighbors, stirring their hearts and mine. I am not eager to straighten her out about what’s under that gravestone. Life will straighten her out. But may this only child never lose a friend, someone her age. May she not face the horror of a loss to a drug overdose, the tragedy that took her uncle. May her childhood continue into an awkward adolescence and an adult struggle for work and love. May her losses be natural. Her Baba, a wonderful woman, and I will die, which is the proper order of things. And when that happens, it’s okay with me for Susanna to suffer a little—sweet memories and a few tears.

So let her hang on to that vision of the dead “partying down there” for as long as she needs it. It’s as good as angels sitting on clouds.

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smithlouise
My little brother was a baby boomer, one of the first things my father took care of when he returned from Japan. I'm prewar, a writer with more recollections than I can ever pass on. My first book, ONE HUNDRED YEARS OF MARRIAGE, was 100% fiction, I thought. But time has proven it was greatly influenced by memory. CADILLAC, OKLAHOMA is fiction. And THE WOMAN WITHOUT A VOICE is just the facts.

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