www.huntermarkham.com Open in urlscan Pro
198.49.23.145  Public Scan

Form analysis
0 forms found in the DOM

Text Content

 * Blog
 * Writing Credits & Publications
 * About

Menu

 * Blog
 * Writing Credits & Publications
 * About

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


RECENT BLOGS:

Blog
Last to Leave
A year ago

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


LAST TO LEAVE

November 30, 2020

I dig my first grave in June 2020. This is not a metaphor. I put my hands on a
shovel and cut through the sod in the cemetery plot on my family farm. I dig
until I hit one of the massive, flat, sandstone rocks that stud the earth here
in northernmost New York. Then, I dig around the stone and heave it out.

I make it 18 inches before a neighbor elects to bring over his backhoe to help
me finish the job.

Dave is a farmer. Always has been. Once we’re done with the backhoe, we use
pickaxe and spade to finish the grave. As we do, Dave tells me that the first
time he operated a tractor solo he was four years old. His hands are hard. He
has no need for work gloves. Pushing seventy years old and he climbs into the
grave to swing the pickaxe to help me smooth the sides, to make it easier to
lower the coffin inside.

“Who passed?” Dave asks.

“My uncle,” I tell him.

“How old was he?”

“Sixty-two.”

I am alone on the farm most of the time. My paternal grandmother is in hospice
with dementia and emphysema. The strokes that damaged her brain, as well as her
trouble breathing, both brought on by a lifetime of smoking. Once she could no
longer stay on the farm, my father asked me to move here, to renovate the place.
When I first arrived, I walked through a hoarder clutter of her memories. It
took me all winter to clear it out, strip nicotine-yellowed wallpaper, and
repaint the house so that it no longer smells of smoke.

Now, my uncle is dead. The first to be buried in the new cemetery my father and
I had surveyed, partitioned, and registered with the county. It was meant for my
grandmother, but my uncle has claimed the first plot. No signs. No warning. He
was hit with a massive coronary and died. He left no will.

I wonder what Dave’s funeral will be like, if the family will invite me.
Neighbors like him don’t exist anymore. He’s taught me about the mix of clover
and timothy he plants in his hay fields, what to feed cattle in the depths of a
subzero winter, and how to read from blood and hair on the snow where a deer was
shot before it ran. It helps us determine when poachers sneak onto the property
to take game. I don’t want Dave to die. It’s impossible to think of someone so
strong and kind being gone, unfair that the world will one day lose a person who
does not wait to be asked but sees another in need and gives.

Gravedigging provides time to think. Measuring out the grave, plotting it
according to the cemetery plan my father created, those first 18 inches of
digging—time consuming but simple. The mind dwells on death, and one comes to
terms. When my father dies, if I am alive and able, I want to be the one to dig
his grave. I won’t pawn it off on someone else.

I am certain we humans began to dig graves as way to process grief. It takes a
long time to remove 87 cubic feet of earth, even with the help of a neighbor and
his backhoe. Dave and I spend hours at it. Understanding sinks deeper with each
stroke of the shovel. Death. The absence of a person. We dig graves and come to
terms with reality as we descend into the earth. We stand at the bottom and know
our loved ones will end up here, that we will too. It’s important to dig graves
for our own.

#

Three months after my uncle’s death, my paternal grandmother is still alive. She
doesn’t know who she is or where she is. The remnants of her voice still retain
a Scottish accent. That’s the only trace of the person she once was.

My gran—my mother’s mother—dies suddenly. Hospitalized for pneumonia, there are
complications. Acid in her stomach, a dissolving intestinal tract, the result of
repeated radiation treatments from her battles with cancer. She is recovering
one day, then she is dead.

Six hours pass before her surviving relatives begin to bombard my mother with
questions. “Can I have her TV?” “What about the entertainment center?” The
jackals circle in the dark, their pale eyes shining. They don’t wait for flesh
to cool before they swarm in—there’s the risk another might take what they want.

My mother arranges travel from California to Texas to deal with the family
scavengers and the legalese.

I book my flight to join her a few days later. One of my sisters is with my
mother now, to help pack up my gran’s belongings. I will arrive the day my
sister leaves, called home for her daughter’s fourth birthday. My mother and I
will drive my gran’s car from Texas to California. I don’t want her to have to
do this alone. To drive halfway across the country with nothing but your
mother’s ashes for company? That’s too much time to think. An unhealthy, lonely
grief with no resolution.

My gran’s wish was that she have no service, no funeral. She only wants her
ashes spread near the ocean at a later date. My mother and I drink a beer in
remembrance—I don’t drink anymore, but I make an exception today. We go to my
great-aunt’s house and flip through an album of family photos. I see my
grandparents young. I almost don’t recognize them.

It’s a chore to remain polite. My great aunt was at my gran’s bedside at the
end, but she is also the one who asked for the entertainment center. Her husband
is in the process of buying a brand new, fire engine red pickup truck when we
arrive at their home. Meanwhile, the night before I flew from Albany to Austin,
I couldn’t eat. Impossible to swallow. I gagged and choked up half-chewed food
into a wastebasket. My gran is dead. Sometimes, it makes sense. Other times, it
doesn’t compute. Someone who has existed my entire life is gone now. The world
is not as I have ever known. Without a service for her, it takes weeks to come
to grips with this. It still bothers me. There won’t be an end until we spread
her ashes.

Despite my anger, I like hearing my great-aunt’s voice. She has the same
middle-of-nowhere West Texas accent my grandmother did. My grandfather had it
too. He died years ago. I still watch snippets of Tommy Lee Jones in No Country
for Old Men from time to time, because he sounds just like my grandfather did.

It takes two days to drive from Texas to California. It is the midst of a
pandemic. My mother and I wear masks everywhere. I wouldn’t have come if it
wasn’t important. My hands are cracked from sanitizer. There’s still so much I
have to do.

From my gran’s things, I ask only for a pair of books. She encouraged my love
for reading, which led to my decision to write books. That’s important to me. I
have to deliver on this. I need to publish a book. My mother doesn’t know, but
it will be dedicated to her. I’ve had it planned for years. I’ll surprise her
with it. I have to accomplish that before she dies.

#

Last night, my paternal grandmother passed. Her life was confusion and pain at
the end. She could form only a handful of sentences. She never knew her eldest
son—my uncle—died before her. At the end, she didn’t remember she had six
children. There is the sense that for her, death is an end to torment and
unknowing, that blankness and nonexistence has to be better than living in
half-awake confusion, forever struggling to recall the events of a dream that
was once your life.

I’ll dig another grave on the farm. This time, I’ll call Dave before I start.
It’s getting toward winter here. We’re ten miles from Canada, so we get snow
from October through May. It’s been mild, but we need to cut through the frosty
earth soon, otherwise my grandmother will be kept frozen all winter, until the
ground thaws, the way winter deaths are handled here.

There is no lesson in this. It is not a cautionary tale. People die. Those of us
that are left carry the ashes and dig the graves. We fend off the jackals. We
try to hold up those around us.

None of my father’s family stayed to help bury my uncle in June. It was he and I
that shoveled dirt over his brother’s casket. The small service we had was one
of the few times I’ve seen my father cry.

“It’s a weird feeling, burying your brother,” he said as we filled the grave.

Some things can’t be spoken. I know that simple sentence was an ice cube bobbing
to the surface, while beneath there was a flotilla of glaciers, bumping and
scraping against each other, ice groaning, all of us about to break.

 

Comment 0 Likes
Share

Back to Top

email: hunter@huntermarkham.com