Dan ing on Dead

36 Short Story

Iwasn’t raised on the playground, but in the graveyard. In the rising hours of the morning, almost every Sunday morning, we went there. My mom grabbed me by the hand and trailed me down the street, past dirt-skirted beige houses to Arnold Cemetery, where the black rail fence reached the sky.

My mother liked death, not for the act of dying itself but for its aftermath. The mourning, the grief, the sorrow. She enjoyed the thrill of how death made people feel, flailing for a sacred feeling when their world dimmed of light and color and loss of love. The grieving and the hurting were her favorite breed of people, and she took on all their emotion as her own. That is why she adored Arnold: the chance to mourn for the deceased and drip heartache over every new grave. In the boundaries of black fences, my mother sang and danced to the tune of tears through morbid grasses full of graves. Sometimes I danced with her and sometimes I watched from across the yard while I traced the etched angels on my favorite pink marble gravestone. I picked the growing daisies and wildflowers and pulled off the soft white petals one by one to scatter them across the grave, just as my mother taught me. “For new beginnings,” she would tell me as we plucked and released hope onto each headstone.

Today, too many years after last visiting the cemetery with my mother, I revived her ritual at her grave. I sang and danced and sprinkled daisies over her until she was dressed in petals like a well-fitted queen.