Burying our Friends

Things I’ve learned about having a gravesite

(I recorded an audio for this one. It’s imperfect to say the least, but I love hearing the actual voice of the writer and I thought y’all might too. I hope it works— someone tell me if it doesn’t! I think it might be at the bottom? Oh well.)

Many years ago my parents offered a resting place in our family graveyard to a few friends. It’s like with other things— you do the research and look up the laws and think okay we got this no big deal— all the while knowing there is something about it you cannot grasp and as my mama says, you’ll just have to cross that bridge when you come to it.

At the beginning of the pandemic my dad started digging a hole for himself. He’s just that kind of guy. In the end he never even got sick— he said it was the pipe tobacco and tequila, a combination he has since given up entirely. But in this brief experiment of digging he realized we would need some equipment. Our ground is rock and red clay, and the graveyard is on a high hillside, scattered with huge white oaks.

On a dark autumn morning in 2024 Hurricane Helene hit, and took down many of our finest trees, including those at the graveyard. Mama had always protected these trees aggressively. But when this happened she didn’t overly mourn, at least not that we could tell. She said God took the trees. They were his and he took them. I appreciate a woman who can see as clearly as that, and doesn’t think she has a right to be upset.

So God cleared the land. In the place of those glorious hardwoods he left us— a story, memories, ache, a heap of work— and more pasture, more room.

We’ve come to see the good in that room. We cleaned the graveyard site of debris. In the openness, I planted a Grandiflora Magnolia, which I had transplanted as a seedling from my grandparents house in Georgia.

When my parents offered the resting place to their friends all those years ago, it was quickly accepted. Turns out burial spots are expensive and none of them felt any sort of connection with the place they had previously considered: a “perpetual care” cemetery right off the highway. They all liked the idea of being resurrected in the woods beside friends. And instead of paying for a ticket, so to speak, to the earth, it felt more like hospitality. Personal.

So many things in our age have been stripped of the personal, haven’t they? Sickness, birth, death, the most tender and sacred moments for our bodies, most of all. If you give over these fleeting experiences where we might be shocked awake to what it means to be truly alive and on the brink of eternity, over to strangers in white coats or suits, what do we miss? Do we even know? If they were left in our own hands we wouldn’t be able to look away— and what would we see?

I don’t know that these things were going through the mind of my parents and their friends. It may be they just got a kick out of being buried the old fashioned way, and perhaps they all enjoyed the idea of causing one another considerable trouble one last time.