Editor's note: One of the most devastating stories This Land ever published was this, Gordon Grice's meditation on his stillborn daughter. Today it remains a testament to grief, healing and what comes after.
1.
I walked in graveyards, gathering trash and fallen branches. I pulled weeds that obscured the names on old headstones and, when I was through, most of the names I’d revealed meant nothing to me.
I took special care with the graves of children. I put the ceramic animal caricatures back on the stones they’d fallen off of. After a rain, I thumbed mud from the Lucite-covered photographs set in stones. I took the time to read a turn-of-the-century marker made of crudely hand-lettered cement. On it was an asymmetric heart pieced from small stones. I subtracted compulsively; death year minus birth year equals age, give or take one.
I started, almost always, with the graves of my own ancestors and cousins. My mother’s mother, dead before I was born. Carved next to her name was my grandfather’s. He was still alive, though his name had been written in the city of the dead for 34 years. My cousin, a suicide at 21. His epitaph declared his heart too big to last in this world. I read his stone with double vision: the disdain I’d always had for such sentiments; the tolerance I had now for anything, anything at all, to ease the pain. I walked along the rows, taking care of people past caring.
That was my daily routine. Sometimes the woman I loved would come with me. I envied her. She seemed to know how to grieve. To let herself feel things, to take time. She wrote letters to our stillborn daughter. She ordered photographs from the hospital and put them in a scrapbook. She talked. Most of these activities were strange to me, though I clumsily tried to emulate her for the sake of my mental health. I wanted to have my private scene at the cemetery, unwitnessed, and be cured for good, or at least for a little while.
Usually the last grave we visited was Abby’s, on the western edge of the cemetery, a new section where shade trees were forbidden and the buffalo grass grew sparse. Around the temporary steel marker clustered a miniature rose bush and a petunia, both recently planted and probably doomed by the heat, and an assortment of artificial flowers. I rinsed the fake flowers every day. Despite my care, mud splashed them and became a coat of dust by the following day. Their brilliance evaporated. My mind crawled sluggishly into the groove of trite symbols—life is transitory as a spring rose, and that sort of thing. I despised such easy comparisons even as I dredged them from my stock of clichés.
One day the petunia bore the marks of some small nibbling animal. The next day the entire plant had been devoured, and rabbit scat lay among the artificial flowers. I cleaned things up. A black string lay on the ground, and as I knelt closer the string resolved itself into a trail of ants. They came out of a small hole in the ground, traveled a few inches, and vanished into another hole.