Our Night in the Cemetery

The sun continued sinking down, and the feeling crept in that the night would be a long one. Our trip was spontaneous; we had brought nothing to make our overnight stay outdoors more comfortable. Neither of us expected to sleep anyway, which was good since there wasn’t a blanket or sleeping bag between us. A backpack she had grabbed from the trunk of the car was all we had, and I had no idea what she had in it. 

Approaching the house, with its frame sagging and paint peeling from decades of neglect and abandonment, my blood chilled to an icy slush and every hair on my body stood straight to attention. I don’t know that my face showed the discomfort I felt, but in truth, I willed it to convey every ounce. I watched in despair as she went ahead without looking back; her waste of my dramatic moment spurring me just enough that I ignored my conflicted emotions and followed.

The late Autumn day had been pleasant, but the sun’s descent had brought in a hasty coolness that only added to the feeling that this was a terrible idea. As we entered the backyard, I could take it no more. “You sure you still want to do this?” I asked, trying to see how difficult it was going to be to talk my way out of the craziness I had agreed to after dinner.

“Uh, yeah, I still want to do this. Wait, are you scared?” she replied, the final word dripping with mockery and challenge. That, at least, had made her stop and turn around, though her annoyance at doing so clearly came through on her face. No matter how badly I wanted to turn around and walk back to our car, I couldn’t let her think it was because I was scared. Sensible, sure. But never scared.

“Come on, scared of what?" came my reply. "Everyone here is dead - they’re not messing with us. There’s no security or anything like that, not in a cemetery. Worse case, somebody sees us out here they’ll either think we’re junkies, breaking into the church for something to pawn, or a homeless couple looking for a quiet place to sleep.”

As I said it to her, I couldn’t help wondering how homeless people felt about sleeping in graveyards. You always heard about them sleeping in train yards and under overpasses, but cemeteries seemed like safe, quiet places to sleep. Then again, maybe I wasn’t the only person to get that strange crawling feeling all over my skin that refused to be ignored. 

“That’s more what I was thinking, ya know? Is this worth the cops being called on us?” I poured everything I was feeling into my eyes as I continued, hoping what they said about seeing through them to the soul, was true.

If she caught a glimpse of my soul through the dirt-streaked window of my eyes, she didn’t let on to it. She just turned away and walked towards the wildly overgrown rusty gate that gave passage from the old house’s backyard to the Church’s. A hundred years ago or more, the house had been the pastor’s home. It had surely been a magnificent structure in its day, with two-and-a-half stories of steep gabled ceilings, grand bay windows, and hand-carved woodwork throughout. It has been left to ruin and rot since before I was born, and in that time has served no purpose apart from giving teenagers a place to mollify their angst in privacy.

The gate had rusted shut years ago and was giving her a bit of trouble. I stood there a moment, silently hoping that this obstacle would be the one to send us back to the warmth of the car, knowing full well the lunacy of my delusion. Indeed, when she turned to throw me a look of disgusted impatience, it was the look alone that propelled me into action; not a word needed speaking. It was in that enlightened moment that I understood my silent resistance was for naught; I was committed to her, and therefore obliged to her plan for the night.

The only means of opening the latch had been to break it, though the feat itself wasn’t difficult given the rust that had long since overcome it. Still, I felt a twinge of something when I destroyed that piece of Church property. Again, in the privacy of my own thoughts, I wondered whether the latch was “holy” or not. If so, this vandalism was certain to bring no good fortune to me.

I dropped the broken pieces of rusty metal at my feet and leaned on the gate with my shoulder, to try and tear it free from the organic tapestry of overgrown vines. Taking care not to injure my hands on the gate’s roughly wrought iron, I grabbed it with both and pushed against it with my full weight. The vines stretched and snapped, tearing free. The gate let out a banshee’s wail that echoed out, soaring over the quiet neighborhood with a life all its own. I glanced back to see her face somehow wearing both disbelief and annoyance at once, prompting me to shrug slightly and mumble out a weak apology.

We continued our hike through the Church’s backyard, now beneath a thick blanket of cloudy, unlit darkness. When she had brought this crazy idea up again tonight, it being a Full Moon had been the trigger. Looking up, there was barely a soft glow to be seen through the portentous clouds stretched across the sky. Swinging my gaze towards the back wall of the massive church's ornate stained glass, its gleam in that dull glow carried the full weight of our transgression to land squarely upon my back.

In the duration of my pause, she had already made it to the second gate - the one leading to the graveyard proper. This one was also wrought-iron, but where the first one had been maybe 5-foot tall or so and fairly plain, this one was far taller and much more opulent in its craftsmanship. It towered over me, standing maybe eight-foot-tall between the ancient hewn-stone blocks forming the perimeter wall. The twisted spikes and intricate ironworking implied that what lied beyond was much more than a lonely refuge for the vessels left by exhausted souls.

I was about to speak up again with another feeble gesture intended as a protest when she turned the gate’s latch. This time there was no rust or even noise; apparently this gate had seen much more action than the one in the sidewall. Free now of its latching, the massive gate swung open under its own weight, creaking so faintly that I could never remember whether it really made a noise or it was just imagination. 

This, then, was the point of no return, I thought, looking back again at the stained glass portrait. Passing through this gate was the declaration of intent that would stain our souls if this ground had any true sanctity. If sanctity meant anything to the cosmos, anyway.

It made little sense to me - if she was right and her plan worked, then everything else was right and they would both be tainted with evil in the process, according to her stupid book. Of course, if it turned out to be nothing more than a dusty old poem out of a musty old book, amateurishly written, by a musty, dusty, and forgotten old man, then there really wasn't anything to worry about.

How then, could I be so certain of our wrongdoing while being just as certain that her scrap of paper was meaningless? That the words on it held no mystical secrets, no forbidden power. Seconds later she had turned on her phone’s flashlight, throwing out a cone of light at her feet and interrupting my solitude. Every headstone that the light touched was another reminder that we did not belong here, that this ground belonged to the dead. 

I moved closer to her so I could navigate my way through safely, but I also watched her from behind as we walked deeper and deeper into this eerie outdoor place where it seems even crickets don't chirp at night. I knew her destination was all the way in the back corner of the grounds, and while I tried to think of the words that would compel her to turn around and abandon this, I knew from her determined stride that it was just time wasted. Another fantasy, borne from my desire to leave this dreadful place where death and decay are forcibly made pleasant with flowers and pathways and expensive slabs of granite. 

Every bouquet served to remind me that flowers were used to mask the smell of rotting flesh. Even the stones that lay plain and unadorned served to illustrate how we all are forgotten, eventually. My mind was a hurricane, and the debris were random thoughts of suffering and sadness. My melancholy was for the losses of those left behind. The lives ended too soon and with far more to accomplish. Brilliance that will never be known, for reasons that are never good enough or far enough away

There were brief moments during our sojourn down those smoothly paved trails when the moon peeked out from behind the clouds. The first time it happened, she’d turned around smugly and said “See, I told you it would be a Full Moon and we’d be able to see.” Before I could respond, however, the light snuffed out as the moon hid itself once more. “Uh-huh,” I managed, struggling internally with whether to say more or not. Watching the back of her head move as she walked, I somehow interred it to be a terrible idea to say anything more. 

We came to approach the gazebo, where you would occasionally see some older person sitting alone during the day. More than once I had wondered what comfort they found sitting there, alone, surrounded by the dead. On this night the epiphany came readily; their comfort came from knowing they had gotten as close as they possibly could to whomever they had lost.

“Is that what we were doing out here?” It had finally dawned on me, and why I didn’t understand the importance of this to her before then, I can’t say. Finally, though, I saw her determination for what it was. I saw past my own discomfort, and more than anything, I realized that she needed to do this. Even if it didn’t work. Even if we stained our souls for eternity; she still had to try. That turned out to be something I could understand.

After the gazebo came the duck pond, its lilies and cattails striking a stark silhouette against the night’s quiet backdrop. It struck me again as odd that even at this pond, which should be brimming with life in its most nocturnally lively forms, that there was not a ripple or chirp that dared defy the tranquility of this place. Suddenly I knew, without knowing how, that this place was, if nothing, sacred. This place was known by God, even if no other graveyard in the world had caught his eye, this one surely had. 

Then again, one would think being noticed by God might make a place feel better. On second thought, it wasn’t God that had His eye on this place. It was something else. By that point, her determination had spread like a virus, infecting me with a sense of purpose like it was my own. Her mission might not have been what was driving me, but ensuring she saw it through was good enough. Our fates for the night were now intertwined, and whatever lay in store for one, lay in store for us both.

Finally, after what had seemed to take the entire night, we were within sight of our destination. The white marble statue stood out in the darkness as though it were illuminated, even though the last artificial light had been at the gazebo, broken. It shone so brightly that I looked up to the sky, expecting to see the moon burning bright, but it remained hidden and out of sight. The idea that this was an omen landed like a feather in my mind and settled in, and I was left wondering which sort of omen this was, exactly. A misunderstood omen is a failed warning, at best. Not that any possible warning could have deterred us at this point. We had given that up the moment we stepped through that ominous black-iron gate.

The marble figure was a slender dancing woman with one arm held up over her head and the other cradled across her hips - a tribute to her mother. The carver’s skill was apparent to me, even on a moonless night, as I admired how the tangles of the dancer’s hair cascaded down around her delicate face. Her closed eyes were telling me that she was lost in her sensual dance; eternally and blissfully. I stood back a bit, silently, as my partner in trespass unshouldered her backpack and began removing a few small items. She arranged them carefully around her mother’s grave, showing the tiny figurines, candles, and clumps of grass and dirt far more respect and gentleness than she had ever offered me.

When finished, she kneeled down and lit the candles she had plunged into the earthen grave of her mother. I’m sure there was some pattern to the arrangement, but I couldn’t find it. She removed a scrap of paper from her pocket; the little tattered scrap that had started it all. As she unfolded it and began to read the words aloud, I drifted back to the day she’d first shown it to me. I hadn’t thought once that day about the loss she must have been feeling, to be driven to consider such a desperate act. She was an intelligent girl, after all, and I had laughed out loud, telling her she should know better than to believe such bullshit. 

I remember feeling amused that she actually argued for it, flipping it back on me by asking, “How can you be so closed-minded?” That had stung right through my amusement. I’m many things, but closed-minded has never been one of them. The sting of it had made me snap back harder than I needed to, shutting her down and winning the argument before she even knew we were having one. 

Shutting her down before I even heard what she had to say. I stood there behind her now, swaying against the cool misty breeze that had risen up with a loose fog as I thought back about that day I called her idea bullshit. The day of my bittersweet victory.

She was reading the obsolete words from her scrap of paper out loud; her Latin pronunciation was off in places but I dared not interrupt. I stood there for a long time, listening to her tongue stumble clumsily over the words. I wondered whether she felt self-conscious at all. I thought about what the hell we would do if this actually worked. Had she even thought about it? I didn’t think so. She just had to try - that’s what this was about. It wasn’t in her to give up, not even to the omnipotence of Death.

By the time she'd finished, the fog had settled in like a mist suspended in the air, and the first rosy hints of dawn were peeking out over the treetops. At first, she just knelt there, quietly holding her scrap of tattered paper tightly in both hands. The grass and mud had enough moisture to soak into her jeans, yet she stayed down on her knees. I almost asked her what she had expected to happen.

It was the statue that stopped me, I think. It was in my periphery, but the white caught my eye and an invisible hand turned my chin to face the dancer once more. That glowing marble face looked down at me with soft, closed eyes that no longer seemed lost in a dance, but at a loss with me.

Looking away from the statue in shame with uninvited tears stinging my eyes, I made myself look back down at her to notice her trembling. I sat down beside her and put my arm around her, knowing that my words were of no use here, even if I could have summoned any. She stiffened at first and then leaned into me before beginning to quietly sob into my neck and shoulder. I could feel the wetness of the Earth soaking through my pants and the warmth of her sadness soaking into my shirt and clinging to my skin. That night, I thought about life and death and birth. I thought of joy and sadness, and need and want, and of so many things in the spaces between them all. 

Mostly, though, I thought about her strength. To want something so impossible, so much, that it becomes a need, and then to do everything within and then beyond reason to satisfy it. If I had not come, she would have come alone. If I had not helped her with the latch she would have kicked it apart, or come back with a hammer.

That night with her in the cemetery, I learned more than the depth of her love for her mother. I learned how much stronger she is than I will ever be.