Hanging out with dead people

On meeting ancestors I didn't know I had, in a familiar place

If you don’t know where the bodies are buried, do they count?

And if no one tells Little You about these bodies in the first place — the bodies that once housed people — your people — what of their stories, trauma, and legacy? Do they live on in you or are they suspended in the bardo?

If you don’t know your roots, is the tree still standing?

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There was no pre-arranged burial plot waiting for my father when he dropped dead. He was thirty-seven, after all. He had all kinds of time to make those arrangements, right?

The job fell to my mother, who bought a plot under the shade of a pine tree in an historic cemetery just a mile from our house. We could visit whenever we liked, she said. For a few years, we did just that, collecting pine cones and placing them on his headstone in lieu of flowers. I liked to — still do — sit on top and talk to him.

I stopped by to see him a few months ago. It was sunny but still cold enough to warrant a jacket. Forty years later, I know how to find him like the back of my hand, winding my way through the one-hundred-eighty-seven-acre park-like campus. His address: 353 Westlawn, on the southwest edge of the property.

But on this visit, I had other stops to make. I was meeting my great great grandparents, William and Sarah, for the first time. Earlier this year, I didn’t know who they were. Now I know their address: 3 Montgomery.

It’s a simple headstone, just for the two of them. A letter carrier and gardener, William died in 1886. She survived him by thirty-eight years. I say their names out loud; I say hello.

Now I’m wondering: Did my father know about them when he was alive? Does he know now that they’re neighbors? What kind of gardens did he grow? Is this why Tim and I are both passionate growers?

We’re in one of the oldest parts of the cemetery, I learn from Thomas, the very nice man from the main office taking me around. He tells me that our next stop, 368 Washington, is about fifty feet away.

The headstone is a gigantic monolith, maybe thirty feet tall. This is where William’s older brother, John, is buried, along with John’s wife, four of his children, and a few grandchildren. John was a carpenter and building contractor and dabbled in politics in the city of Philadelphia. He was elected as real estate assessor in the mid-1860s and then as Recorder of Deeds in the early 1880s.

Now I want to know: What’s the deal with the tower, Uncle John? Did you and your brother plan to be next-door neighbors in the afterlife?

The brothers married two of the McClellan sisters; was that a coincidence? Did you guys hang out? I have so many questions.

I sit in the car unable to drive away. Adrenaline is coursing through my body; I am lightheaded.

My father used to sing lines from songs that he liked, albums he’d spin on the turntable in the living room. “Yes, we have no bananas,” from Harry Chapin’s 30,000 Pounds of Bananas was a favorite. Jimmy Buffet’s “I wish I had a pencil-thin mustache” another. Cher’s rendition of “Apples don’t fall far from the tree” he didn’t just belt out; he repeated it like a mantra.

All those times that we came to the cemetery to visit our dad, unaware of the lineage, the taproots of this apple tree dating nearly two hundred years unbeknownst to these apples. All those times.

My father’s death forty years ago was shocking not just because he was young. It was shocking because he was the glue of our extended family.

He was supposed to take over the family business when our very ill uncle died from colon cancer. He was supposed to look after his mother, who died of a broken heart just weeks after he did. The family fell like dominoes, and the rest of us were immobile under the weight.

There was no one for me and my brothers to turn to, our mother so deep in her own grief and the other relatives nursing their own wounds from three deaths in three months.

Knowing now that my brothers and I belong to a bigger story, that there were/are elders looking out for us in our loneliest, most unmoored moments, just a mile from where we ate dinner every night, is a long overdue receipt. Of course it would have been nice to have known back then. But there is no time for regrets.

Before I head back on the turnpike, I make one last stop at the Jewish deli in the old neighborhood. Where I used to walk the three blocks to watch the old men with white paper hats behind the counter in action, slicing corned beef and tongue, bagging up loaves of marble rye, plucking pickles from the crock.

I order a turkey and Muenster on rye, with brown mustard. A can of Cel-ray to wash it all down. I sit in the car and eat half of my sandwich. The pickle isn’t what I remember. The old men and their hats are gone. I’m ready to go.