“Some of us are walking around carrying hurts that belong to people already in the ground.”

I went to the cemetery today. I was taking a walk and just found myself there.

As I moved through the graves, I realised that I had not lost a loved one. My parents are alive. My siblings are alive. My friends are alive. I once lost a friend as a teenager, and it hurt then. But it doesn’t anymore. I remember what he looked like and his crooked smile, but it doesn’t hurt. And this is a privilege in and of itself.

Some of these people have been dead for over a hundred years. Died in 1914, 1924, etc. Long before I was born. Or any of us reading this.
If I were alive in that era, I wouldn’t even be able to stand in the same room with them because of my race. But I walked by their graves, and I wondered if they turned in their graves.

Life is really fickle and meaningless.

Some lived to 45, 80, and even 91. The youngest was the grave of a young girl who died at 25 in 1930.

Maybe these people died of a brief illness. Maybe they died of AIDS or cancer. Maybe they died of the plague. Maybe they died in the war. Maybe they died in a ghastly motor accident. And maybe they just slept and never woke up.
Maybe it matters how they died, or maybe it doesn’t matter how they died.

BUT THEY ARE DEAD.

Some graves were made with marble. Some were concrete. Some had been swallowed by time, inscriptions faded, and headstones cracked.
There were graves which were already destroyed by the elements. Grave broken. Headstone shattered. And there were graves which had been newly renovated, even though the deceased died in the 1970s.

There were graves with flowers and those without. There were graves I saw, and I assumed that they probably had no living relatives. Some graves had been cared for, and I could tell they were frequently visited.

And somewhere between the marble graves and the broken ones, between the flowers and the forgotten, you realise that some of us are walking around carrying hurts that belong to people already in the ground.

Unresolved.
Unclosed.
The argument nobody won.
The apology that never came.
The forgiveness that wasn’t ready in time.

The dead don’t wait for us to figure it out.
They just leave.

Song of the Day: “500 Miles” by Peter, Paul and Mary.