The Yelling Man in the Cemetery
From Pére-Lachaise to Payne’s Chapel
As Helena and I stepped back onto one of the many long and narrow avenues of Pére-Lachaise, a man walked quickly by us. We were heading north and so was he, but soon he outpaced us, determination on his face. Dressed conservatively, professionally, he carried a briefcase in one hand, a handful of long-stemmed roses in the other.
He was just another busy Parisian, one of many we’d seen over the last couple of days. Paris is surviving, getting through and carrying on. November 13 seems fresh on everyone’s mind, tourism is down and security is increased, but the city is keeping it together. It seems to be.
The man turned the corner ahead of us and left us to our stroll. We walked slow, taking our time and looking to the left and right, peering into spaces between stones for any of the famous cats that make the cemetery their home. We’d spotted one a few turns back, a brown and black fellow who was happy to approach but not so keen on pets.
“Non! Merde! Non non non!”
Yelling in public is always a surprise. When it happens back home in New York, I can come to terms with it, rationalize it, trace it to its source and decide it’s okay. Just some drunk party-goer, just another construction worker. But yelling in an otherwise quiet cemetery is unnerving to the pit of your very soul.
It was the man with the roses. We turn the corner and there he is, just down the next avenue, and coming back the way he came. He is coming our way.
“Non! Non! Ta rose! Merde! Non, ta rose!”
The man is running now, leather shoes slapping the stones. Running so hard his feet must hurt, he’s desperate to get back to somewhere. He doesn’t care he’s being heard by strangers. His voice is cracking, full of anguish. He passes us like we’re not even there.
“Non! Grand-mere! Grand-mere, ta rose! Grand-mere!”
Helena looks at me and I look back. Something has happened here and we know only that we’re both shaken. My French is poor. I can read some, speak a little, but I know enough to translate the running man. I caught “no” and “shit” and “your rose” and then “grandmother.” The last was clearest and saddest. The words click in my head and pieces come together to make his story, or what I think is his story.
The yelling man visited the cemetery in the middle of his busy Saturday afternoon, perhaps out of respect, maybe out of obligation. He brought flowers. He spent as much time as his schedule allowed, then went on. He is a busy man. Only a short distance from the exit, he realizes he still has the flowers, flowers he meant to leave at a grave. Immediately, his business no longer matters, his schedule is no longer important. He becomes simply a grandson who misses his grandmother and is just sorry, so very sorry he kept her roses. He runs to her, crying to her.
Pére-Lachaise is a still-functioning cemetery. As you pass from plot to plot, you can find timelines from a century ago right alongside dates far more recent. Famous composers and authors keep company with ordinary and unheard-of people. If you’ve lived in Paris (or even just die in Paris), you can be interred here. Pére-Lachaise has the graveyard equivalent to guest stars. Heloise and Abelard died over six centuries before Pére-Lachaise opened in 1804, but they’re here all the same, moved stone canopy and all in 1817. The transplanted couple improved the popularity of the still-new cemetery, thought at the time to be too far from the heart of the city.
There’s a waiting list to make your final rest at Pére-Lachaise. Even then, the rest isn’t guaranteed. Older plots, historical plots will keep for eternity, but more recent plots are offered as a 30-year lease. At the center of Pére-Lachaise, situated behind a memorial inscribed with Aux Morts, is a wide square of perfect green grass. Under the square is an ossuary where abandoned residents are relocated when leases are up and room must be made.
After the yelling man, Helena and I fell quiet, then she said, “I worry we shouldn’t be here, it feels like we’re gawking.” It’s worth asking. Is it right to wander such cemeteries like tourists, to sight-see and refer to posted maps of who is buried where and seek out favorites?
Of the many things I felt in that moment, however, unwelcome was the last. Cemeteries have never been scary to me, not even when I was a kid. I never cared for hospitals, still don’t, but cemeteries are restful, peaceful. Occasionally creepy, but in a way I liked. Light behaves differently in a cemetery, particularly when trees make good shadows. There are so many trees in Pére-Lachaise.
“I think we’re okay,” I said.
My grandmother, my mother’s mother, is buried in a plot next to my grandfather across a blacktop road from Payne’s Chapel on Lookout Mountain. For years before she passed, I knew where she’d spend her physical eternity. About once a month, she and my Aunt Sarah, sometimes my Uncle Roy, would make a weekday visit to the Payne’s Chapel cemetery. My grandmother would clear leaves and old flowers from my grandfather’s grave, then do my great-grandmother’s grave the same service. My Aunt Sarah would tend the grave of a departed sister as well as a smaller plot covered with a simple pile of sparkling marble stones.
It seemed always like my grandmother was seeking a way to tell her departed husband that not only was she still thinking of him, that he was more than a faded photograph on her dresser, but she should have told him so much more. My mother, however, never missed an opportunity to show her mother, my grandmother, just how much she mattered, how much she loved her. She’s wonderful like that, my mom. Nobody she’s loved has ever had to wonder, including me.
My mother visits my grandmother’s grave when she can, clears it and makes it look neat and right. It’s a way of remembering. Remembering is the point, after all. But my mother doesn’t make the pilgrimage to Payne’s Chapel nearly as much as her mother did. She doesn’t need it.
Gravestones are for family, for friends, for the survivors. Let them have their due. But those stones will remain for years on, crumbling slow as stones do. The engraving might grow illegible, but someone else will see it, let their hand run over it. Someone will notice. Nature itself cannot ignore a gravestone, can only erode or cover with moss. Crack it with a root or shifting earth and it’s still there.
Cemeteries are memories gathered and made solid, an attempt at permanence in the face of mortality. A person lived a life and they had a story. Here they lie, a collection.
Helena takes my hand and we make our way along the next avenue, walking through the columbarium at the north side of Pére-Lachaise. The urns interred along the walls at four corners are just like the stones we’ve passed, much older dates next to some only in the last week.
On our way out, we find Oscar Wilde’s memorial, a wonderfully garish stone inexplicably Egyptian in style. An inch-thick plexiglass barrier has been built to keep visitors from kissing the stone. Lipstick was starting to eat away at the memorial. Today, kisses are placed on the plexiglass, sunlight casting lip-shaped shadows across Oscar’s name. A few enterprising and brave visitors have pulled up and over the top of the barrier to kiss where they can. The lips of the winged Egyptian angel creature atop the monument are hot pink.
Hours later, I’m still thinking about the yelling man. I’m worried about him, though I’ll never see him again.
The yelling man feels like all of Paris. There are makeshift memorials at The Bataclan, around the monument at Place de Republique, along the memory garden at Pére-Lachaise. There are soldiers on corners in the Marais. But Paris insists on getting by, one day to the next. You can feel this need to let out so much more grief, to just fall apart, but there’s no time. Paris can’t scream and run, so it remembers and moves forward, each step in front of the next step, roses in hand, business to do.
The yelling man feels like all of us. It’s been a hard year for the whole world, the hardest I can remember. It would be wrong to draw attention to Paris’s grief without pulling back to take in the entire picture. The news is heartbreaking, not just daily, but hourly. None of us are immune to all this sadness. And somehow we sigh, gather up, keep going. We keep moving forward. Business to do.
Until we just have to yell.
