In the Bone Yard
I was a trumpet player in my high school band, which always participated in the Memorial Day parade through my hometown, ending at the bone yard. I often got to be the echo, playing the second run-through of “Taps” unseen and off in the distance on the side overlooking the railroad tracks and the river. The cemetery was across the street from my childhood home and was the place where my father had been buried since I was five.
Not afraid of cemeteries, even at night (I never “whistled past the graveyard”), I rather regarded them as quiet places, querencias, to walk, run, sit at the base of a huge favorite pine tree and think, or slam a tennis ball for hours off the front door of one of the mausoleums. I used to bury my nose in the grass over there and breathe in the deep earth long before ticks would make that unwise. One of our scout leaders ran on the paths before running was a thing and our scoutmaster was in charge of maintenance. My feisty Downeastah grandmother, who lived downstairs, episodically threatened to go urinate on the grave of someone who had pissed her off in life. There was a headstone in honor of a WWII vet killed in the Pacific with whom my mom went to high school. We always knew his story.
I didn’t yet know these lines from Shakespeare’s sonnet number thirty —
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste.
Today is a day for sweet silent thought. It was always good to know my dad’s remains were there and whenever I chose to I could go see the flat stone with the carved dates honoring his Air Force service. “Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid some heart once pregnant with celestial fire,” wrote Thomas Gray and, though he didn’t live long enough for me to really know him, I suppose my dad had that. He had plans and dreams and celestial fire and asked my mom when he was dying of cancer how he could be a hero to her while leaving her with two very young sons and dreams deferred forever.
Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche also lost his father at a very young age and it influenced his thinking. He wrote — “My formula for greatness for a human being is amor fati (i.e., love of fate): that one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity.” As we have observed so often together in these posts, there can be no cherry-picking if you embrace the Inquiry Into A Gratitude-Inspired Life.
Nietzsche goes on — “Have you ever said yes to a single joy? O my friends then you have said yes to all woe. All things are entangled, ensnared, enamored…” I would not be the man I am had my father lived. There is no scenario whereby I am not someone else with a different history. It’s literally unthinkable, because changing one thing changes it all.
It’s a day for remembering and also for saying yes, yes to all of it, because all is “entangled, ensnared, enamored.”
