The Cemetery at the End of the Road
It fills me not with sorrow, but with grace and humility
It took thirty years for me to fall in love with my neighborhood. A lake at the end of the road. Trees. Deer. A bench. I saw them, but not really. And I didn’t know how happy it all made me until I thought of leaving.
When the pandemic hit, I vowed to walk every day. Even though I’d walked outside for years, it pains me to admit that I’d never paid close attention to my surroundings. This past year, I made a firm commitment. I’d open my eyes. Rain or sun or snow — no excuses — I’d walk.
And then a spate of medical misfortunes had me temporarily sidelined. I had a hysterectomy, a bladder reconstruction, my ovaries removed, and a new breast implant after a decades-old mastectomy.
Still, I kept walking.
When I had to physically heal after surgery, I started slowly — a walk around the block, past the park, and into the parking lot of the soccer field. From there, I hit a walking trail in town until I was going full-speed.
After each surgery, I had to start all over again. I cried in the kitchen because I had no stamina. I had once been a professional dancer and choreographer in New York City, and my body functioned like a finely-tuned instrument.
At age seventy-two, things are different.
Women don’t speak about hysterectomies. I wasn’t even sure I knew what one was until my doctor uttered the phrase “Uh-oh.” For five months, my bladder had been peeking out of my vagina, until elective surgeries (don’t ask me why they are considered “elective”) were able to be scheduled safely due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
I underwent the pre-surgery tests, contemptuous of the time they took. I wanted to be writing at my desk. Sitting across from the surgeon at his office, I answered his standard questions until he looked up from his computer and said, “What do you do?”
I told him that I was a writer.
“You lead an interesting life,” he said.
It hit me that much of my life was behind me. But I still had more stories to write, more conversations with friends, more lovemaking with my husband, and more hugs to give my children and grandchildren. I needed to approach them with reverence.
I first noticed the cemetery on a slow walk after the autumn surgery. The gates were wide open as if beckoning me. Majestic trees towered on both sides of the paved entrance with tombstones on the left and right.
When I posted a picture on Instagram of the iron gates, the blue sky, the hundred-year-old trees, an acquaintance messaged me saying that her husband was buried to the right of the entrance. I had never met him, but the next day, I found his tombstone and stood in front and cried. I said a prayer and promised to return.
Every walk I take now ends at the cemetery. It fills me not with sorrow, but awareness and humility.
I don’t like having to stop my forward momentum and check in to a hospital to care for my body. I’d rather be walking in wide-open spaces than suffer that interruption, or pack up my life and move somewhere new.
My youngest daughter, who lives two thousand miles away, recently said, “Mom, you’re never going to move.”
I didn’t know how to respond.
I miss her. I miss my son and my oldest daughter. I miss my eight grandchildren. They all have talked to my husband and me about leaving our house. After more than a year of not seeing them in person, moving closer began to sound appealing.
But I’m reminded of the lake and the bench and the deer and the trees. I know those things can be found elsewhere, but not every neighborhood has a cemetery at the end of the road.
Julie Maloney is a poet and author of the award-winning novel A Matter of Chance. She is also the founder and director of Women Reading Aloud, an international writing organization dedicated to the support of women writers.
