Can we really justify spending $1222 a month on nitrogen-rich fertilizers and specialized irrigation for a patch of earth that serves primarily as a heavy, rectangular lid? It is a question that sticks in my throat like the dry summer dust of a late July afternoon. We treat these six-by-three-foot plots as if they were luxury real estate, manicuring them with a precision that borders on the pathological, yet the tenants haven’t complained about the weeds in at least 32 years. We are obsessed with the aesthetics of the afterlife, or more accurately, the aesthetics of our own grief as it sits on display for the neighbors. It is a strange, expensive theater of denial, where we pretend that the grass is the most important thing happening in a place designed for ending.

I am currently watching Claire J.-C. navigate this theater with a weary, practiced grace. She is the groundskeeper here, a woman whose hands look like they were carved out of the very oak trees she maintains. She is currently wrestling with a 42-inch commercial mower that sounds like a localized thunderstorm, cutting paths through the 222 rows of granite and marble. Claire has been doing this for 12 years, and she has developed a certain callousness toward the concept of permanent residence. To her, a grave isn’t a monument; it’s an obstacle to a clean line of sight. She views the world in terms of drainage, soil compaction, and the persistent, annoying way that the earth tries to reclaim what we’ve attempted to square off.

The Frustration of Preservation

There is a specific kind of frustration that comes with Claire’s job, an idea I’ve been chewing on as I watch her work. It’s the core frustration of trying to preserve something that is designed, by its very nature, to fall apart. We want the stones to stay upright, the letters to stay crisp, and the grass to stay a uniform shade of emerald, despite the 92-degree heat and the 72 percent humidity that is currently melting my resolve. We fight the slow-motion explosion of entropy with weed-whackers and pressure washers, and for what? To maintain a facade that time has stopped? It’s an exhausting lie. We spend our lives trying to build things that last, but in the end, we are just giving the dirt something interesting to swallow over the next 102 years.

[the earth is a hungry machine that never stops eating]

The Cadence of Misapprehension

I realized recently that I have been a fool for most of my adult life. I’ve been pronouncing the word “awry” as “aw-ree” in the quiet sanctuary of my own head for 32 years. I finally said it out loud during a meeting about cemetery bylaws, and the silence that followed was so profound I could hear the 2 crickets chirping in the corner of the room. It’s a small thing, a linguistic stumble, but it made me realize how much of my certainty is built on a foundation of misapprehension. I thought I knew how the word sounded, just like I thought I knew how a memorial should look. But I was wrong. I’ve been wrong about the cadence of my own language, so how can I trust my judgment on the cadence of life and death? This realization has colored everything. I look at the 202 headstones in Section B and I don’t see names anymore; I see a series of mispronounced intentions.

Let the Lichen Win

Claire J.-C. stops the mower near a large, weeping willow that has seen better days. She wipes the sweat from her forehead with a bandana that might have been blue in 2012 but is now a dusty gray. She tells me that the hardest part of the job isn’t the digging or the mowing. It’s the people who come here with a measuring tape. They want to make sure the flowers are exactly 12 inches from the base of the stone. They want to know why the lichen is growing on the north side of the monument as if it’s a personal insult to their grandmother’s memory. They are desperate for control in a place that is defined by the total loss of it. It’s a contrarian view, I know, but I think we should let the lichen win. We should let the stones lean until they are at a 22-degree angle. There is more honesty in a weathered, moss-covered slab than there is in a polished piece of rock that looks like it just rolled off a factory line in 2022.

We have this idea that preservation is a virtue, but maybe it’s just a symptom of our inability to say goodbye. We cling to the physical remnants because the alternative is to admit that the person is gone and the earth is moving on. Claire points to a plot near the fence. It’s overgrown, the grass reaching 12 inches high, tangled with wild clover and a few stubborn dandelions. “That’s my favorite one,” she says, her voice cracking slightly under the weight of the 92-degree sun. “Nobody has visited that one in 52 years. The earth is finally taking it back. It’s becoming part of the woods again.” There is a peace in that overgrown plot that the manicured ones can’t touch. It’s not trying to be anything other than what it is: a return to the source.

Sanctuary of Cool

The heat is becoming unbearable. I follow Claire back to the maintenance shed, a corrugated metal building that looks like it’s being held together by rust and prayer. Inside, however, is a different world. She has a small office partitioned off from the tractors and the bags of seed. It’s the only place on the grounds where the air doesn’t feel like a wet blanket. She installed a system from Mini Splits For Less last year, and it keeps her sanctuary at a steady 72 degrees. In this small, cooled box, the entropy stops for a moment. It’s the one place where she can sit and drink her lukewarm coffee without the sun trying to bake her into the floorboards. It’s a necessary mechanical intervention in a landscape that is otherwise entirely subject to the whims of the atmosphere. Here, she can look at her spreadsheets-the 22 work orders for the week, the 12 grave openings scheduled for August-without the dizzying haze of the humidity clouding her judgment.

I sit on a plastic chair that has seen at least 22 years of use and think about the irony of our technology. We use these machines to create tiny pockets of stability in a world that is fundamentally unstable. We cool our offices while the planet warms; we mow the grass while the soil shifts. It’s all a bit “aw-ree,” isn’t it? (I still can’t say it right). We are so busy managing the surface that we forget what’s happening underneath. Claire shows me a map of the cemetery from 1902. Back then, there were only 32 graves. Now there are thousands. The map is a grid of attempted permanence, a series of boxes drawn on a piece of paper that is slowly yellowing and falling apart at the seams. Even the record of our existence is decaying.

The Friction of Timelines

I find myself wondering if the frustration we feel about our own mortality is just a misunderstanding of scale. We think 82 years is a long time because it’s the span of a human life, but to the granite, it’s a blink. To the soil, it’s a light meal. We are trying to force our human timeline onto a geological one, and the friction between the two is where the grief lives. Claire J.-C. understands this better than anyone. She sees the 2 inches of topsoil that form over a century. She sees the way the 12 different types of trees she’s planted have warped the fences with their roots. She doesn’t fight the change anymore; she just manages the transition. She is the choreographer of a very slow dance toward the inevitable.

As I leave the cemetery, I pass a young couple standing by a fresh grave. They look lost. They are surrounded by 22 floral arrangements that will be dead by Thursday. They are looking for something to hold onto, some sign that the person they lost hasn’t been completely erased. I want to tell them to look at the weeds. I want to tell them to look at the way the sunlight hits the 42-year-old cedar tree. I want to tell them that the preservation they are looking for isn’t in the stone or the grass, but in the fact that the earth is willing to take us back at all. But I don’t say anything. I just walk to my car, the thermometer on the dashboard reading 92 degrees, and I drive away.

The Epitome of Letting Go

I think about the word “epitome.” I used to think it was “epi-tome,” like a very large book. I thought it was the “epi-tome” of wisdom to keep everything exactly as it was. But I was wrong about the word, and I was wrong about the wisdom. The epitome of living isn’t staying the same; it’s the courage to let go when the time comes. We are all just visitors here, renting our 72 kilograms of carbon and water for a few decades before the lease is up. And when it is, no amount of $1222-a-month landscaping is going to change the fact that we are finally home, tucked into the dark, quiet dirt where nobody cares how you pronounce anything. It is a terrifying thought, but also, in a way that I am only just beginning to understand, a deeply comforting one. The pressure to be permanent is finally gone, replaced by the simple, 2-letter reality of being ‘in’.”

[the grass grows regardless of our grief]