Dr. Kellie Brown is a violinist, conductor, music educator, and award-winning writer whose book, The Sound of Hope: Music as Solace, Resistance and Salvation during the Holocaust and World War II (McFarland Publishing, 2020), received one of the Choice Outstanding Academic Titles award. Her words have appeared in Earth & Altar, Ekstasis, Psaltery & Lyre, Still, The Primer, Writerly, and others. More information about her and her writing can be found at www.kelliedbrown.com

 

The Living Among the Dead

By Kellie D. Brown

My car turns right and heads up the steep, narrow road lined with a smattering of houses that have seen better days. This Saturday after Thanksgiving arrived unseasonably warm, and the sun shines so brightly that I need my sunglasses. With a sharp left turn, I’m easing up the old church’s driveway, which makes a u-shaped circuit in front of the building. There is no actual parking lot. On Sundays, cars park haphazardly in the grass on a property whose cemetery occupies the main acreage.

I leave my car on the paved driveway since I’m only expecting one other visitor and eagerly step out into the sun for a few minutes of solitary contemplation. This white clapboard church perches on a hill, permitting me a panoramic view of the farmlands beyond and the patches of bare trees newly stripped for winter.  I don’t need a coat, but still my arms fold reflexively around my favorite Lake Junaluska sweatshirt. I walk toward the first row of graves, with the brown, dead leaves crunching underfoot. But before I can examine any of the headstones, I glimpse my aunt’s maroon SUV heading up the driveway. She and I have established a private ritual in recent years of meeting near the start of Advent and then in the late spring to decorate some of the graves. Pleasant Hill Church of the Brethren is one of the oldest churches in Sullivan County, Tennessee. Founded in 1842, it provided an important meeting place as well as a house of God for this rural community and hosted some of the influential shape-note singing schools of the early 20th century. My father’s side of the family has been part of this church since its beginning, and many of them are laid to rest in its vast cemetery. With its weekly attendance now averaging less than 20 souls, the church has more witnesses in the ground outside than seated on the pews inside.  

My 71-year-old aunt opens her back hatch, revealing bouquets of artificial poinsettia and holly bushes. These would be cringeworthy in the interior design of a living room, but provide what is necessary for decorating the dead. We gather the new flowers into our arms along with trash bags for the old sunflower bouquets we put on six months ago. As I pull them from the urns attached to the ends of the gravestone, I’m surprised at how little their yellow has faded. In the distance, I hear some children at play, their squeals in counterpoint to a rooster who is strutting in the yard next door and crowing his cock-a-doodle-doo even though it is 3 o’clock in the afternoon. We are the living among the dead.

Aunt Mary and I always start with my great-grandparents— Joseph and Elizabeth Jordan. I never knew them. My great-grandfather died in 1944, when my father was an infant. My great-grandmother, who went by the name Ella, died in 1971, when I was six months old. I have heard the story many times of how she arrived at the Bristol hospital right after my birth, donned in her high-heeled shoes and fur stole, demanding to see her first great-grandchild. Those who remember her talk about her kindness, her elegance, her stubbornness, her love of purple. On the occasions that I have been called “a little Ella,” I have taken that as high praise.

With Christmas flowers secured for him and her, we move to the left. I take time to read the headstones as I pass, many of which date from before or during the Civil War. I think about the gravestone epitaphs of some of my favorite poets.

John Keats — “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.”

Seamus Heaney — “Walk on air against your better judgement.”

Although many of those who rest here are descendants from Scotch-Irish immigrants who settled in these Appalachian mountains because they looked like home, none have poetic epitaphs, just simple inscriptions of name and dates being ever eroded by time, but maybe that is poetry enough.

Today’s visit reminds me of Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play Our Town, with its crowing rooster that opens the play and the ease with which it moves back and forth in time, measuring the unremarkable days of the living and the unrelenting procession to the grave. I think especially about the setting of Act III, with rows of chairs lined up as gravestones in a cemetery that also sits on a hill and overlooks the town of Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, a fictional place nestled on my same Appalachian mountain range, although above the all-important Mason-Dixon line. In this final Act, the dead provide commentary on a funeral that is underway, pulling the reader back and forth from the burial rites of the mourners to the detached exegesis of those beyond the veil. Wilder’s contemporary T.S. Eliot made similar observations about the dead in his poem based on his one visit to the small Cambridgeshire village of Little Gidding, which sparked an epiphany about the passage of time.[1] A ghost guides the narrator of Little Gidding in realizing how much the living refuse to know. “And what the dead had no speech for, when living,/They can tell you, being dead: the communication/Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.”  

The residents of Grover’s Corners sing “Blest Be the Tie That Binds” throughout the course of the play, including at the interment in Act III. I believe this 18th century hymn written for a rural congregation in Wainsgate, West Yorkshire, captures one of the essential themes of Our Town, revealing that the threads of human connection remain strong enough to hold when we are parted, even parted by death. Parishioners at Pleasant Hill also sang this hymn at the conclusion of every service I attended as a child, my small voice joining in with the more robust singing of my grandmother. I can think of no more apt an anthem that describes my relationship with this place.

Drawing my attention back to the task at hand, I reach the end of that row where my great-uncle and great-aunt, Carl and Anna Mae Jordan, are buried. My dad grew up especially close to this uncle and spent countless hours helping with the farm as well as accompanying him on hunting and fishing excursions. I knew both and regularly visited their farmhouse just over the ridge from this cemetery. In fact, their headstone faces in the direction of where they spent their many decades together, and I wonder if that is intentional. Aunt Anna Mae wore a black wig held in place with old-fashioned, u-shaped hairpins, and as a child, I crawled behind her rocking chair and gathered the lost ones from the floor. It was a fun game for me as the adults talked, and she always seemed grateful for the handful of pins I retrieved. A wiry man who took pride in his appearance, Uncle Carl played the fiddle, and during the final years before his death in 1993, he and I would play together at this church, either a violin duet or with me accompanying him on the piano. I linger a moment longer after setting the flowers in place. A deep and familiar sadness descends on me. Next to their grave rests a small headstone with a lamb on the top. It is worn and the writing difficult to decipher. I bend closer though I know what it says— Joyce Marie Jordan 1942-1949, their only child who died of a brain tumor.

Aunt Mary and I gather our trash bags and the dwindling number of Christmas bouquets so we can cross to the other half of the cemetery that lies to the right of the driveway. My feet move more hesitantly as this is the most emotional part of the ritual. The graves of my grandparents are located there— William F. Dubel, Sr., and Hazel Pauline Dubel, née Jordan. A small American flag sticks in the ground next to my grandfather’s name, placed there by someone in honor of Veteran’s Day that just passed. He served as a Sergeant in the U.S. Army in World War II, a member of that Greatest Generation. He died tragically in 1978 during his final night shift before retirement. Fellow workers found him slumped at his desk, a victim of a massive heart attack. I was a second grader when he passed, and my memories of him remain sparse, just snapshots mostly. I remember him as a warm and kindhearted man, as well as a gifted builder and craftsman. I can clearly see him sitting in his green vinyl rocking chair, where I enjoyed climbing onto his lap or onto the wide armrest where I pretended to ride a bucking bronco. Short film clips play through my mind of him assembling my swing set and building a rabbit hutch for my white bunny, unoriginally named Peter Cottontail. My most vivid memory regarding him is of waking in the night to a commotion. I padded down the hallway in my pajamas to find my father crying. He bent down to tell me the horrible news. He was incredibly close to his father, and I think he never truly recovered from this sudden loss. I believe that many of the problems that plagued him in the years that followed came from the absence of this guiding and stabilizing presence.

I was able to enjoy my grandmother for many more years. She and I shared wonderful times together as kindred spirits with our love of books, crossword puzzles, and tennis. Her small house on the street behind mine provided a much-needed sanctuary for me during a difficult childhood. In anticipation of our visits, my eager feet ran across my neighbor’s yard and through a hedgerow that would be fragrant in the summer with honeysuckle. Now, I visit her here. By the time she passed in 1998, I had a son whom I named Jordan after her maiden name. He became a beloved figure to her in the way I always had. There was no greater joy for me than to watch her dote on him and call him by his name. Although she died 25 years ago, I don’t think a day passes without her coming to mind and without feeling the dull ache of missing her. Her absence has left a ghost root, that empty place you must carry around that retains the same shape as your lost loved one and can never be filled.[2]

After I wrestle the Christmas bouquets into the green Styrofoam of the Dubel urns, I reach into my pocket and extract two polished stones. I place one on each end of the gravestone and stand back with my head bowed. I wish I could have this moment alone, but my aunt, who has shown no emotion so far, begins to cry, saying “I miss her so much.” This is such a part of the ritual that it could be scripted, although I suspect that for Aunt Mary it bursts forth as a surprise each time. The burden of co-mourners remains the thread that binds our relationship. In her book-length essay Ongoingness, Sarah Manguso describes it this way— “The catalog of emotion that disappears when someone dies, and the degree to which we rely on a few people to record something of what life was to them, is almost too much to bear.”

This sober moment passes, and we gather the bags of used flowers, which we will ‘plant’ again in the summer since they are in good shape. Clouds have drifted over the sun while we worked, stirring up a chilled breeze. With the earlier warmth lost, my hands are cold, and my nose has started to run. There is a sudden awkwardness as we make small talk at my aunt’s car, both of us lost in our own thoughts and feelings, both of us eager for time alone to process the experience. After exchanging a quick hug and “I love you,” I’m in my car. With the heater turned on high, I drive across the rutted driveway that rattles me and my car. I consider stopping at a coffee shop for a hot beverage, but then reject the idea. I don’t want to rush myself in making this transition from the dead to the living. I am content to remain a bit longer in this nunc stans.

In Our Town, the Stage Manager declares that “the dead don’t stay interested in us living people for very long.” Maybe that’s true, but I don’t think it can be so black and white as that. I believe in a more active cloud of witnesses. In the play, it takes Emily Webb’s dying for her to grasp how precious life is. From the vantage point of the grave, she cries, “Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.” Then, she turns her tear-streaked face to the Stage Manager and asks, “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?” “No,” he responds. Then after a pause adds, “The saints and poets, maybe—they do some.” This is the deeper reason for my visits to this graveyard. As I honor and remember my beloved dead, I also need to be reminded of the preciousness of life, to create my own memento mori. With the cemetery in my rearview mirror, I pray the prayer of the psalmist, “Teach us to number our days.”

[1] Little Gidding is the fourth and final poem in Eliot’s Four Quartets, which he published over a six-year period from 1936-1942.

[2] The concept of the ghost root appears in Carol Goodman’s 2008 novel The Night Villa.