He pulled off the road and I could feel my agitation start as I anticipated another of his spur of the moment, time consuming detours. We were making our way back from a half day hiking trip and were in a slight rush to make it back home before it got too late. I opened my mouth to give voice to my annoyance but stopped short when I looked out my window and saw headstones - we were in a graveyard.
As we crept up the long driveway, I could see a sea of grave-markers, most of them dotted with brightly contrasting flowers, stretching out into the distance over a large green hill. My agitation quickly melted into curiosity and he seemed to sense the question forming in the back of my throat.
“Someone that I know is buried here”, he said as we eased further into the cemetery.
I looked at him slightly perplexed but he didn’t seem to notice. Someone? His vague explanation sent my mind spinning. I pictured a long-dead relative known only to him through one or two old and worn, black and white photos in his grandmother’s photo album. Everyone has that “legendary” member of the family, the war-hero, the celebrated relative, the one that the older people tell stories about when they gather at holidays or reunions. I figured that maybe he had grown up hearing the name of the cemetery and that somehow, we ended up passing by it as we meandered through the North Carolina back-roads on our way back into the city. I was sure that my silent musing explained the spur of the moment hard-turn that brought us into the graveyard.
We stopped the big black jeep on the driveway for a few seconds as he looked over the neat rows of headstones. I could almost see the indecision in his eyes about which way to go despite the black shades he wore. “There is a sunflower on the gravestone” he said without looking at me. I wasn’t sure if it was a thought being stated out loud or a prompt for me to help him search.
Sunflower? The previous idea of some long-dead family war-hero faded from my mind as I followed his lead and searched the headstones for a sunflower from the passenger-side window. Not seeing anything from our current vantage point, he put the car back in drive and we drove further in. We rode slowly about half way up the drive and then came to an easy but hesitant stop.
“My sister is buried here”, he said almost casually as he suddenly hopped out of the car.
My heart stuck a little as I recalled him telling me of her fatal car accident when he was just fourteen. I was surprised that this mainly stoic man had dared face this emotional wound in my presence. My hand hesitated on the door handle, I wasn’t sure if he wanted me tagging along for something like this. I knew this wound wasn’t healed and that there was still a lot of pain there for him—some of it coming, ironically, from the wall that he had built to hold it at bay and the guilt he accumulated for waiting so many years to come back and face that sunflower etched headstone.
I could feel the heaviness in the air as he gestured for me to get out of the car. Still hesitant, I tried searching his expression for confirmation that he really wanted me to join him but his eyes were still hidden behind the dark shades. As my hand pulled the handle, the normally faint sounding pop of the door opening seemed exaggeratedly loud in the heavy, quiet atmosphere. I slid one leg out slowly and became aware that I was feeling a mixture of things---his pain, my compassion and a sense of honor that he allowed me close enough to see a portion him that he himself had trouble facing.
He stood there waiting on me, his demeanor seeming calm and solid. Both of my feet found their way to the ground and I pushed the feather-light jeep door closed behind me, the sound of it echoing loudly, breaking the solemn silence. He didn’t seem to be as bothered by the noise as I was as I joined him on the grass and we meandered slowly, passing quietly through the cement markers that held down a small patch of earth, not so much for the lifeless bodies below, but more the living that needed a place to mourn.
I stayed a few feet behind, my intuition telling me that he needed space. I looked at all the names and dates of the people who had once lived in, contributed to, and died from this world that I now exist in. My eyes couldn’t help but linger on each name. Who was Emma Fowler and who still places flowers on her grave in the cold of January twenty years after she has passed on? What color was her hair? What kind of life had she lived? Did she ever picture strangers walking over her grave and wondering what kind of person that elegantly shaped headstone was left to represent?
I felt the need to read every name as I passed and it was only when I had gone too far, that I realized that he had stopped. I halted a few feet behind him and only when he knelt down, did I see the sunflower.
I---having an almost sixth sense where emotions are concerned---was suddenly aware of a gateway of sorts opening in that graveyard, releasing a deeply sheltered ache. It was palpable and I could almost hear it breaking the silence as it neared, making its way to him, getting louder and louder as it weaved around the other headstones, engulfing their presence. He didn’t move from his place in the grass. He was solid—as always---as he faced her headstone and a barrage of other things that I could sense but not see. After more than ten years of hiding from himself, her and this moment, he was finally ready to open up. I wasn’t sure if it was a final ‘goodbye’, a long held, ‘hello’ or just an honest, ‘I miss you’ but I knew the silence had waited far too long to be broken.
I could sense him giving in as his long-held pain met up with the physical place it had been scared of and I knew that my presence wasn’t needed. He didn’t need my support, my shoulder, a hug or even my reassuring smile; what he needed was what he had been too scared to ask of himself all this time--to be alone with his sister and tell her how he was. I whispered that I was going to take a walk and I was met with a raspy “Thank you” and a slight nod of acknowledgement over his shoulder.
I turned in the opposite direction but couldn’t help glancing back at him. I felt this strange sensation of intrusion and curiosity both at the same time. I was torn between moving away from him quickly, giving him the privacy to mourn and the wanting to witness something so profound; the breaking down of a wall, the facing of a long denied truth and the bitter-sweet self-forgiveness that would settle in the wake of it all. These were the moments when life seemed exceedingly fragrant and vulnerable, when the heart opens after being walled up for so long.
As I walked away, I studied the play of light in the fading January sun. I noticed how the barren trees stretched long, casting even longer shadows as they stained the grass with darkness. I entered the other side of the graveyard and made my way to a statue of three men who looked out mournfully, watching over the last markers of earthly existence and I stood next to them and waited.
I lingered there for a while, wishing I could see him from my lower perch. I knew he was over there and I wondered what he was saying to her. I wondered how one manifested that tightly held pain into words and I wondered what expression his face held when he finally let it go.
It wasn’t too long before he appeared on the rise and I felt guilty that I had wondered so far from the jeep. He didn’t seem too bothered by having to look for me and he stood silently, patiently and waited for me to cross through all the cement souls to reach him.
“I left a picture of my son”. My heart turned over for him. “It’s a relationship that will never happen”. He continued solemnly, “I told her about him”.
I pictured the delightful little seven year old boy who stole his father’s good looks and rambunctious mechanical mind. I ventured a suggestion, not knowing how it would be met. I quietly told him that maybe next time he visited this place that he should consider bringing his son. He was quiet, clearly mulling over the probable scenario and after-effects of such an outing. I didn’t want to intrude too much because I don’t have a child and could not fully understand this situation by the nature of being on the outside looking in but I reminded him that this place holds love and truth and that neither of those things should ever be hidden.
When he finally spoke, I was ready for him to tell me to mind my own business or that I didn’t know what I was talking about but he didn’t and I realized just how safe he felt with sharing his wounds, regrets, fears and hopes with me. “My son has an un-natural fear of death.”
“This isn’t about death”, I explained, “Its about building a bridge between two people that you love the best way possible in this very limited physical existence.” He took a minute to ponder my words and then nodded his head in silent agreement. We walked in silence a few minutes more and I wondered if his son’s fear of death in part, stemmed from the wall that his father had constructed to protect himself from grief; a wall that effectively kept out the pain but also closed him off from love and living life in the process.
As we neared the jeep, I rubbed his back, he caught my hand and gave it a squeeze and I couldn’t help but wonder if he would be different now.
We climbed back into the jeep and it wasn’t long before the conversation expanded to include not just him, but all families who had lost a child, a sister, or a brother. It seemed that there were few more destructive things that could happen to a family than the death of a child. We talked about how grieving can take many misunderstood forms---one of which being, isolation.
I wondered silently what the other three members of the family had gone through in their own personal battles with pain, grief and acceptance. I wondered how the death of such a vital link created four unique pathways of coping and sometimes how those pathways crossed over the others or as in my friends case---carried them briefly further away. More importantly, I wondered how each of them had overcome and who, if anyone was around to witness that fragrant, vulnerable moment when the heart opened—a moment like I had witnessed with him today.
He opened up to me further, expressing his guilt over leaving home to join the military and the idea that his choice to “run away” somehow contributed to the well of grief for his family and had especially weakened his younger brother’s ability to cope with the loss. I listened and became very aware of how his grief grew, like the roots of a tree, reaching deeper and deeper into his life and wrapping around the choices that he had made. I stared straight ahead, out of the windshield at the double yellow line and realized that his burden was bigger than I ever knew. I swallowed past the lump in my throat when I saw a tear slide from under his dark shades. His face crinkled slightly and I knew he was crying, although his voice remained mostly stable. I reached out and grasped his hand.
The warmth from where our hands met and the feeling of life and love contained within that grasp gave him the courage to continue speaking. Having reached the end and confronted the grief, he was ready to revisit the start---the day it happened. He sucked in a deep breath and told me about being called into the principal’s office and told that his mother’s friend was there to pick him up. He immediately assumed that he was in trouble and had no idea that the sound of the traffic accident that he had heard earlier from his school classroom was the sound of his world changing. He had heard the impact. He had heard her death.
As we pulled into my driveway, I was reminded of the Buddhist philosophy that all beings are interconnected and that we all share the same pain. I realized that although I have never had this kind of grief in my life, that I am profoundly affected by the emotional journey of my friend; a journey that started with the death of a woman I never knew. I marvel at how every life lived ripples out to somehow touch us all and I have no doubt that some tiny piece of everyone, even people unknown to me before today---like Emma Fowler---has found it’s way into my life, even if it was just in the form of helping me be there for my friend, write this piece or bind me deeper to the world around me.
I looked over at my friend once more before we climbed out of the jeep and further away from this profound day, and knew that the image of him kneeling down in front of that headstone, delicately etched with a sunflower, would be burned into my mind forever as a memory of the moment that someone I love faced death and ultimately found life.
He turned to me with one final thought, “That headstone, that place, is the only real evidence that she existed other than me or my memories.”
As I recall this day one week later, I think about those words and the significance of a person’s final marker in life---their headstone. They say the message of a sunflower is to always look towards the light and even though I don’t know the specific significance of the choosing of a sunflower for her final resting place, I must say that after what I witnessed in that cemetery, that I couldn’t agree with that message more.
*originally written February 2012
