Slender Lines of Memory

One of my favorite places within the framework of Highland Square is Mount Peace Cemetery. It’s a ten-minute walk from my apartment, and I can lose upwards of an hour wandering its roughly one square mile.

In January and March, I walked through the cemetery thinking about endings, death, loss. It was a place where I could be sad without seeming out of place. I watched the trees bud and the grass grow lush under a slowly warming sun.

At the beginning of September, with all the trees and shrubs in their fecundity grasping at the dregs of summer, I walk here thinking about life, about all the lives these stone markers represent.

Who were Gladys and Gerald Sullivan? Where are their children?

Who was Chester A. Hoff, dead in 1939 at age 50? Why is there no spouse next to him?

I mine these graves for stories now, for character names and ideas. The death I saw in winter seems fully alive in the flush of summer, teeming with possibility.

Here is Edward and Elizabeth Messerly, who both died in 1973, some 30 years after their 2-year-old daughter AnnaMaria passed. How sad those 30 years must have been.

If I’m to believe the headstone, Noble Drake’s wife, Eva, passed away in 1946, but Noble is still among us. He was born in 1900. Could that be true in 2017?

Robert and Rachel Haskins.

Paul and Dolores Doney.

Columbus and Alice Vinson.

Leonard and Gaynell Swindell. What must it be like to be a widower for 40 years?

Elizabeth G Bajinsz Lived to be 98 after burying her father (William) in 1963 and her mother (Esther) in 1973. 1917-2015. And she was buried here, next to her parents, not a husband.

Howard and Oleefa Danmer.

Walter and Dolah Brewer.

Fritz and Herma Popper.

These were people once, and they become people again as I walk.

The Doneys had four sons, all of them terrible bullies, who went to four different state schools, each on a scholarship for a different sport. They all work in the electronics business now.

The Vinsons produced two daughters and a son, in that order. The elder girl is a pediatrician, the younger married a surgeon, and their boy produces quirky off-off-off-Broadway plays in various vacant buildings in Queens.

Howard and Oleefa never could have children.

Gaynell Swindell died in childbirth. That’s how Leonard was widowed. He raised their girl on his own, then entrusted her to the U.S. Army. She was wounded in Afghanistan, then nursed Leonard for 19 years after she regained the use of her left leg. When he died, she moved to Maine with her long-time girlfriend.

The Brewers went through a terrible scandal with each one of their kids: felony larceny, drugs and booze. In that order.

And the Poppers. They raised five girls and two boys in that old Victorian farmhouse that was at the westernmost corner of Summit County for generations. When the youngest, Terri, finished dental hygiene training and moved to Idaho with her dentist husband, they sold the whole property and moved to a condo in Tarpin Springs, Florida. When they died, in 1985, just two weeks apart, all seven kids, 19 grandkids and six great-grandkids came into town to inter them at Mount Peace. The second funeral, Herma’s, coincided with Founders Day. The grandkids were all fascinated by the bikers. Their parents were annoyed at all the noise.

I never feel the least bit lonely when I walk in Mount Peace. The stories are deafening.