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“You are dust, and to dust you shall return.” Genesis 3:19
"Where are you?” my husband asks through my cellphone. “Sitting in a cemetery,” I say. I stopped here on my way to the grocery store to sit among the dead.
Near my city’s center, this cemetery has a parking problem. It’s surrounded by small, tightly packed, single-family homes, people who can’t afford a mountain view in the Shenandoah Valley, people who can’t be too picky about their neighbors. My car is parked in a tow-away zone, so I sit in the grass among headstones where I can keep an eye on it.
An ambulance siren wails a few blocks away, but here there is no sign of distress. It’s so quiet. So still. Only me and a squirrel, who’s giving me the side-eye as he nibbles an acorn. I contemplate the quiet of death. The rest. The feeling of peace that slowly fills me as I allow myself to forget about my parked car, my grocery run, the work left on my to-do list.
I take in the names on the headstones nearby and wonder what advice Abby, Erwin and Paul would share from the other side. I wonder: what would my grandparents want me to know? Or my friend Chrissy, who died by suicide? Here, in the cemetery, I am reminded of my reality: I have one precious, limited life. What will I do with this time? What will you?
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