How Graveyards Come To Life

So, about 7 years ago, I landed this job at this rich old lady’s house, estate I guess you’d call it. She had lived some life, she had, suffered and triumphed over numerous husbands, some dying under more than mysterious circumstances (I never trusted the last one – he had millions of dollars (and she had amassed quite a bit after her first two unsuccessful marriages) and yet she demanded he take her to Washington, DC on their honeymoon. I mean, her father was a known Communist, and no matter what, who goes to Washington, DC in the middle of March? She liked the look of the place, she said, constructed supposedly in some ancient, plotted out craftwork done way back when by the Free Masons (she had secretly wished her father was a Mason, rather than a Communist…..secrecy and pomp, robes beguiling men in the dark), but, still, him falling from that building seems a very rare case of circumstance to me). That fall, as well organized as the Masons’ triangular crossfire of structures, made her a true millionaire, so far off into the waves from the big boat of dependence that she was free to travel the world on her own, to each and every place her soul desired.

It was then, seven years ago, that I found myself in her employ – I was much younger, and still beating along from two year job stint to 2 year job stint, hoping for one of my many eggs to hatch. But they seemed to flourish loudly for a moment or two, offer me much in the way of hope, and then tremble from some unforeseen aftershock in my destiny, troubled and random as it was, and quietly fall over, the guilty foundation of some stack of cards not yet realized. This was another way to keep at it, on the sidelines, the back burner, whenever the free time would let me and spaces permit. She was smart, but kooky, this old woman and- in addition to the exotic objects acquired along her fields of travel since her need of a husband ceased, she had acquired mass possessions simply from the reams of said husband’s estates morphing into her one, very wealthy, eccentric and independent collection of life around her, in that big English Tudor home in the woods, just up an almost breath-shortening hill off of the main drag. My job? I was like a butterfly collector, organizing and logging in and separating out and piecing together all her life’s things. It was quiet – there were the other people in the house to talk to…nothing spectacular or earth shattering, I mean- the gardener, the lawyer who visited more often than I thought was possible, the accountant who practically set up rooms there, the cook, the maids, it wasn’t too many to keep track of, but enough that you grew to like some more than others, but deep down, you knew you’d be there only long enough for one of the constant few playing cards you had neatly tucked away in your stockings to erect itself and come to life, finally.

There was a period when the old woman got ill (brain tumor), and she had to let me go (funny thing is, in all that time she had about ten estate sales planned but didn’t sell one damn thing. She was just like me – except I thought I was trying to gather, while she (though she’d deny it) most definitively stepped back when it came time to release her little darlings for someone else to procure). I thought it would be a grand time to try my hand at long talked about escape from that old town, and a new way of life for me – in all ways. It began to burgeon, and then it didn’t. Stagnation and yet, a happy quiet time for me. Then, I had to work again, because – you guessed it! The house of cards was still a garden wall, half built (a whole other set of bricks, but the little piggies lied. They got blown down one by one, all the same). It was more of the same, with a couple years on me (and to add insult to injury, I never left the area surrounding the main drag near the big hill which led to the old lady’s place) and then one particular day, she bumps into me on the street. She was taking walks up and down her big hill per doctor’s orders. She had survived a brain tumor! Who does that, nowadays or ever! I knew she had a tenacity which was beyond most people’s and I always respected that. Whatever she had been given in life was done so, because of absolute action on her part.

Long story short, she wanted me back. Same job, same house, same possessions (again, not one had been sold off even since I had left), same people. I knew what I was doing wasn’t all that high profile or life long (who works for one person their whole life anymore? All day, not in charge, forced into relationships and perimeters that anyone with any sense of spirit would use as a stepping stone and not as a final destination. Might as well lie back into your grave and warm it up). So, more than a few years later, things became less ‘ok’ for me. Coming back I had made my peace with, and I –as always- could sleepwalk blindly through these over categorizations of her library of many, many things (she had ordered in even more people to dust and clean them, more inept and dullard like than the original set which were all still there, of course, mildly bleeding the old lady dry just enough to fit with their quiet desperation, their overly ordered lives which lacked any shred of inspiration. I came to find out from some of them (because even though I had, from the start of this and the last employ, always tried to divorce myself from them emotionally and keep my dignity intact, my dreams afloat and my world, more precious and satisfying than the dead air in that place, alive and breathing, they still somehow were like snotty little kids, grabbing at fireflies because of their light. I knew, deep down, that we All have this light, all Gods, Heavens and Hells within us, adventures and paths alongside us the whole time, but them – they didn’t see it, and I wasn’t letting go of my light to help them to see it. Each person must do this for themselves), small details of their lives, and my wings grew weary of their buzzing…..busy little bees around the few remaining divots of honey that the old woman had left to herself. She had lived out her dreams, one way or another, but what had They done with their lungs, full up with oxygen like anyone’s, their health and youth, but drain the old woman of her only children, just so they didn’t have to feel the nervous worry (fireflies call this excitement) of how to get out there and Do from the purest place in their foolish little hearts?

I had grown older, made bitter and made intensely aware of losing the experience, presence and delight of forces and people loved and cherished, and I came to re-appreciate my original mantra of not suffering fools. Sorry, fools. Even jesters learn to be tricksters sometime. My heart demands it of me, and I’ve learned not to cross her. Suddenly, the sight of them all, their ever growing and diminishing hoards made me physically sick inside. Joking about the old lady’s tumor, about the oddness of some of her treasures, which sounded to me as disturbing as a din of slaughter just a few feet downwards, over the slope of the hill. The reverb of bullet holes tearing flesh and sucking vitality from its most tender places. Nothing left but a hissing afterward; a mourning for the wrong things said yes and no to. Engaged, and ignored. There was one of the old woman’s army of accountants there, who I could tell felt the same things I did about the richness within, and what each moment Can bring, but he was so mired in so many things that there wasn’t much room left permitted for a conversation, much less anything else of worth. As usual, I had to go it alone and did so, hating them behind their backs. It’s funny – it all too rarely hits people that they do not have to experience the world in the way that they have been taught to, or expected to, but somehow this is fleeting for most and just sears itself off like clockwork screws misshapen and tossed right out the windows, shooed away by the rest of those surrounding them, those who would rather live in an open faced graveyard.

Speaking of…The old lady, God bless her, died finally at the ripe old age of 93. It’s a very special number to sail off upon, and sail off she did. Into the seas of her own making, to meet her bevy of husbands who would still, even considering, probably like to show her around and make time with her. It was Her energy that drew in all of them, and not the other way around. Her equally snot nosed son, not a man but more of a collection of spindly fears and malnourished black holes, took over for her estate and for awhile, all the members of the household bled as much of her money out as they still could. No shame. He tried to play daddy but it didn’t work, since there was no respect on either side. Her sold off every last piece of her stuff, every last one, and abandoned the house, and the property, firing them all. Not a surprise really – when no blood or life force can get to a wound, it pales and dies. Babies and rocket scientists know that. Oddly, turns out the place was sitting all that time over government land, which – if you go way back to the original deeds, revealed a shady clause to its original acquiring. When things are built on a lie, they never survive, and it’s always found out one way or another. Why live duplicitously again and again, when you can live as you want to in truth – just one, easy time. I never ever understood that. Guess I never will. The house was torn down, and a graveyard was set to be built over it. Those who are Actually Dead often get passed over, in lieu of those looking to cram themselves in with the early bird special. We don’t have to lie back down in the familial DNA of our generational coffins. By coming to life as ourselves we honor our bloodline and its many triumphs and devastations, limitations and specks of profound joy.

I walked by the place the other day…by the graveyard I mean. Thought out of the first few rows of the newly dead, I might find the old eccentric, or see her speckled ghost walking in late afternoon between the tall grasses and willows, looking for her long lost treasures (since her son never came. Afraid of the dead, it seems). I should have known when I asked the groundskeeper – the low back buckled, sun burned old man who used to tend her garden. He shuffled a bit, from all the lifting at his age. A smile crossed the far corner of his mouth, the one that lets in impetus, the sort that takes you west to the places without noise. He told me what I halfway knew to be so in the malar flush of my battered, regenerating heart. It happened far from this place, he said. How perfect, I thought, right smack in the most central point of the liquid world where all the routes meet to run astray in the chaos of all directions. I walked off, and realized how immense a late afternoon in the soft tide of early autumn it was. How it had been so full and beautiful every single day I had come to work there. How it robbed me of that same beauty, day after day. How I let it. I walked then, in the right steps, down the amber of the hill with the ease of a firefly who had managed to weave above and beyond the sticky, chubby hands of the clobbering kids who chased it, they not realizing that they had it the wrong way around. The tickle of the barley grass snuck up my skirt a few times, the stubborn dew that hide itself had up and kissed my bare ankles, and the sun baking at the hearth blanketed my back with its palm, motherly and forgiving. The old lady’s ashes had been scattered out at sea.

M. Lucia