Diary: The Quick and the Dead
13 January 2013
Late yesterday morning, a group of us convoyed to a cemetery near Berkeley for an improvised graveside tribute to the matriarch of the family and her husband. She died a year ago New Year's Day; he died more than two decades before. Poems by Blake and Yeats were read, and a piper played an Irish song and then a medley of them. Tears were shed.
The grave sits on a bluff that looks out at San Francisco Bay - a beautiful spot, actually. I was last there when my father-in-law was interred. Since that visit, many others have joined him. His immediate neighbor, Albert Gunnar Jacobson - I studied his gravestone during the Irish medley - lived to be 102, I noticed. Chinese, Japanese, and Korean names dot the landscape. These are flat gravestones, closely set. On the surrounding hillside are more conventional gravestones and the odd mausoleum.
Being there made me think of another graveyard. Three of my cousins, one of their sons, and their father are buried in the churchyard near my family's old summerhouse in Nesodden, a peninsula across from Oslo. I visit their graves whenever I stay with my family there. I like the idea of the living and the dead sharing a place. In the churchyard, a new marker - a rock, really - is added when someone in the family dies. The gravestones we visited yesterday are lined up in an orderly fashion that precludes their gathering. Perhaps especially for Irish families, this seems unfortunate. That the gravestones are close together in Nesodden may be an accident - one cousin died young, and then others followed, prematurely, but there's something about grief that wants solidarity, even among the dead.
One of my family's houses in Nesodden is situated so that the guest room at the corner coincides with a ley line. I thought that ley lines were related to electromagnetic fields, but (a visit to Wikipedia reveals) they mark a trajectory that's both topographical and spiritual. Given the location of the house, I would guess that this one aligns with the church, which in its current form dates from the 11th century, I was told. One night, sleeping in this room, I was visited by my dead cousin. I knew this in retrospect, waking with the thought that he'd left a message about his daughter for me to convey to his father. I did so, and learned from his father that I was the third person who'd approached him with a similar story, the message differing in each case. He then mentioned the ley lines, but the others weren't sleeping in the room or even in the house.
What was odd about this experience was that for a while I had a kind of clairvoyance - I don't know what else to call it. I went to visit my dead cousins in their resting place and could see at once that the cousin who had visited me was still around - his gravestone was "alive" in a way that I could see, while his brother was long gone. I guessed that his concern for his daughter, his one survivor - her older brother having died in a car crash, like her father's brother at almost the same age, kept him tied to that place.
Now that cousin's daughter is married and has two daughters - a good marriage. His widow, too, is remarried and happy. So has he moved on, finally released? I'm not sure. I slept in the same house two springs ago, but in a different room.
Late yesterday morning, a group of us convoyed to a cemetery near Berkeley for an improvised graveside tribute to the matriarch of the family and her husband. She died a year ago New Year's Day; he died more than two decades before. Poems by Blake and Yeats were read, and a piper played an Irish song and then a medley of them. Tears were shed.
The grave sits on a bluff that looks out at San Francisco Bay - a beautiful spot, actually. I was last there when my father-in-law was interred. Since that visit, many others have joined him. His immediate neighbor, Albert Gunnar Jacobson - I studied his gravestone during the Irish medley - lived to be 102, I noticed. Chinese, Japanese, and Korean names dot the landscape. These are flat gravestones, closely set. On the surrounding hillside are more conventional gravestones and the odd mausoleum.
Being there made me think of another graveyard. Three of my cousins, one of their sons, and their father are buried in the churchyard near my family's old summerhouse in Nesodden, a peninsula across from Oslo. I visit their graves whenever I stay with my family there. I like the idea of the living and the dead sharing a place. In the churchyard, a new marker - a rock, really - is added when someone in the family dies. The gravestones we visited yesterday are lined up in an orderly fashion that precludes their gathering. Perhaps especially for Irish families, this seems unfortunate. That the gravestones are close together in Nesodden may be an accident - one cousin died young, and then others followed, prematurely, but there's something about grief that wants solidarity, even among the dead.
One of my family's houses in Nesodden is situated so that the guest room at the corner coincides with a ley line. I thought that ley lines were related to electromagnetic fields, but (a visit to Wikipedia reveals) they mark a trajectory that's both topographical and spiritual. Given the location of the house, I would guess that this one aligns with the church, which in its current form dates from the 11th century, I was told. One night, sleeping in this room, I was visited by my dead cousin. I knew this in retrospect, waking with the thought that he'd left a message about his daughter for me to convey to his father. I did so, and learned from his father that I was the third person who'd approached him with a similar story, the message differing in each case. He then mentioned the ley lines, but the others weren't sleeping in the room or even in the house.
What was odd about this experience was that for a while I had a kind of clairvoyance - I don't know what else to call it. I went to visit my dead cousins in their resting place and could see at once that the cousin who had visited me was still around - his gravestone was "alive" in a way that I could see, while his brother was long gone. I guessed that his concern for his daughter, his one survivor - her older brother having died in a car crash, like her father's brother at almost the same age, kept him tied to that place.
Now that cousin's daughter is married and has two daughters - a good marriage. His widow, too, is remarried and happy. So has he moved on, finally released? I'm not sure. I slept in the same house two springs ago, but in a different room.
Comments
Post a Comment