A Walk in the Cemetery & A Reflection on Beginning Again

This place opens you up from the inside. You can feel it when you enter the perimeter of the gates. You might find yourself faced with a cornucopia of emotions: excitement, joy, curiosity, along with sadness, anxiety, and introspection. But it also invites you to slow down and let go. If you allow yourself to get lost in the sections, leave your vehicle parked on the side of the road, and just wander, you start to notice things. An ant line crawling up a tree trunk. The faded dates of a limestone marker. All of this nature and history sitting right in front of you that you might otherwise be too distracted to notice. I think this is true about most cemeteries; they hide a kind of magic we often overlook. I also like to think that maybe our presence is appreciated by the people lying below us. That they might enjoy watching us wander, whether we’re wandering joyfully, frustrated trying to locate a grave, or mourning someone we’ve lost. I like to imagine that all the messiness of life still happening above them brings them some kind of company.

My life has been very messy. I’ve been a very messy and confused person. I always assumed everyone had their major life crises as adults. But I think mine started when I was 14 and only just ended somewhere in my early 30s. And yes, I can almost hear them laughing and cooing at me from their cool blankets of dirt below, “Oh sweet girl, you’ve barely started.” But I do believe I’ve at least cleared some major hurdles.

I’ve found it to be true when they say having a child changes you for the better and it’s the best thing you’ll ever do. They just don’t mention how confusing and painful it can be. I saw a video of a caterpillar turning itself into a chrysalis recently. It starts out with the camera person, a mom, calling gently to her children in the house “It’s happening! It’s happening you guys…” she fades to a whisper, encouraging them to do the same as you hear their feet pitter-patter closer to her and their little voices squeal with excitement. This is all background noise with the camera fixed on the long and squishy insect squirming as it hangs from the top of a white mesh habitat. And then you literally watch this thing start to peel itself out of its own skin. I didn’t expect it to be such a gnarly 6 minutes. It like unzips its body suit. During a particularly intense part of this guy’s pupation, the part when the face just like stops being the face, one of the little voices in the background softly asks the mom, “Does it hurt him?” And I could feel that question in my own soul and I am going to go ahead and guess that the answer is absolutely yes. This is what being a parent has been like for these past 9 years. It’s been this beautiful, amazing, incredible gift to watch, and genuinely the greatest honor of my life to get to be a part of. I do not know what I did to deserve this gift or how lucky I am that I stumbled into it with such an incredible partner. But I have to say it has also been excruciating. I feel like I peeled my own face off. I emerged from where my spinal cord used to be. Because the writing was on the wall, or in butterfly terms; the blueprint was already inside. The old me needed to go. She couldn’t be a mom if she wasn’t going to start changing from within. And although this was only the beginning, I’ve been successful enough to feel prepared for the next phase.

Unfortunately, or maybe we’ll say exhilaratingly, the next phase appears to be the gnarliest part of it all. Because in addition to working on yourself, you may also have to face some truths about your own upbringing and the adults who surrounded and molded your life. This is the quiet part, the part of the process others won’t necessarily see or be a part of because only the little creature inside its own chrysalis will know and understand the full story and be able to move itself through this stage of its transition. And I think it hurts more, and it’s best done alone. And because I’m still navigating this part, I don’t know what to expect at the end of it, adding to the chaos of the transition. Generations carry more than just lessons; they carry pain and unfinished business too. That feeling you get when you enter these gates is pulled by all of this as well. You may even be visiting someone here whose presence starts the momentum of ruminating through the past in your mind. And that can be an uncomfortable part of your own metamorphosis that this place forces you to return to time and time again.

I understand that not everyone’s visits to the cemetery conjure up such heavy emotions, and that not everyone experiences such painful transitions in their lives; some visitors’ experiences here may be more comparable to the birds and squirrels who can come and go as they please, feeling untethered but taken care of, or their transitions in life more like a birch tree shedding its skin gently through the changing seasons. But no matter what you feel or move through, you can find it symbolized in cemeteries.

-LL