The view from Stanich’s / Reading to the dead

I will write about the next morning, and things I learned, but that is not this entry. This entry won’t be comprehensive about how I’m doing, either, but it’s sure part of it.

***

The grave is just a mile’s walk from my mom’s house, if you go when the gate by Stanich’s Restaurant is open.

If the gate by Stanich’s isn’t open – I think it closes at four to four-fifteen – then you have to walk farther on Fremont to the main entrance by Rose City Funeral Home, where there is no actual gate except a sign with the admonition that it is unlawful to be in the cemetery from dusk till dawn. Which means that visiting hours will be substantially trimmed in the winter. (Not that drizzly winter weather wouldn’t already trim the number of evening visitors.)

Stanich’s Restaurant makes what it says is the greatest burger on Earth. It is certainly a remarkably tunefully delicious burger, and, if you order it to go, so you can take it out to Gwen’s grave, you can sit at the bar and watch the unusual, fixed order and technique by which this burger is constructed on the grill. For what it’s worth, in 2006 AOL Cityguide included Stanich’s in a list of “15 Burgers To Try Before You Die.” It includes egg, like few burgers do outside of Australia, and, because of a certain monstrosity that was perpetrated at a diner in Port Augusta, South Australia when I was a small child, I was at first therefore dubious about Stanich’s World’s Greatest Burger. I was wrong. That is one tasty sandwich. As you sit, you can look around and see the most sports pennants that it is possible to see at one sitting.

And, if you go in the cemetery gate behind Stanich’s, you will find Mr. Stanich himself right up next to the fence, along with his wife. He wanted to be buried as close to his restaurant as he could. I keep hearing that a secret of happiness can be to never retire. There is a coat of arms graven on the flat marker. I can identify two of the four elements on the shield: a hand of playing cards, a mug of beer…

Most days I try to convey my respects as I pass.

Gwen’s grave has no marker. Not yet. Maybe not for a while. It was extra, and I myself was broke and relying on her parents’ money, and in the sudden, foot-thick-gray-glass-over-gorgeous-day rush of the afternoon of July twelfth, her parents and I were waiting for no extra nonsense as we went over things with good old Joel at the funeral home. So I figure I’ll pay for her marker myself, when I can – they start at $850, and as I recall it will cost more for installation. So another reason for getting to know Gwen’s neighbors a little is to comparison shop for what the right marker might say on it.

The cemetery only allows upright gravestones for couples, anymore, not for single graves, because … I had thought it was because of the mowers, but evidently that is not the reason; it’s because otherwise all the upright stones don’t let the machines and vehicles get in to do any more burials, because no one digs graves with shovels anymore – so it is like painting yourself into a corner, only with granite. And to buy a couples spot would have been much more expensive, even though the parents were thinking something like that over. So Gwen is in a section of the graveyard that is for singles, and Gwen’s marker will be flat, which I would not have had, but I find that, Gwen being gone, it isn’t what matters. I will love her flat marker.

And my mom has since purchased the spot right next to Gwen for me – I will pay her back – and that too will be a single grave with a flat marker, and that is all right with me.

I wonder what her marker will say. The sifting of possibilities continues.

I know where the grave is in relation to a tree, and to a little round cement plug of a section marker in the ground, and as yet her grave is still a mound with sod over the top. I have wondered, and have talked to Gwen about this: Do they have the amount of dirt exactly figured so that, with the coffin and liner added down below, the surface will subside perfectly down into flat turf? Or do they bring out a heavy roller at some point? I told Gwen I’d bet on the roller. The grassy lawn around the surrounding graves is too perfect. Anyway, I sit by the grave as I talk and run my fingers through the blades of grass as I used to run my fingers along the hairs on her arm. As she always liked.

Can she feel? There begins a whole raft of curious questions.

Gwen is at the far side of the cemetery from the funeral home and main entrance, the furthest west. A little further beyond where she lies is a belt of unimproved land that is being held in reserve, between Gwen and the hedge-fences, that is covered in wildflowers. Beyond that, it’s a residential neighborhood around the cemetery. And this is a big space. So there is quiet – the sound of the breeze, sometimes the calling of the crows. The crows like it here, here and more toward the middle of the cemetery where there are more tall trees to sit in – they like all the open ground with mown grass where there is no cover to hide things that might pounce, and with so few people. You always see the crows all over the city, usually in twos and threes, doing the serious business of finding things to eat and being smarter than most of the humans, but in the cemetery you get the feeling that the crows are relaxing. Now and then a swallow darts in its swooping course over the most open sections, like where Gwen is, there and back over the unimproved land, hunting gnats.

She’d like it here. Maybe apart from the strange business of being here. But I don’t even know that.

***

Such speed of dying, in a case where it wasn’t instantaneous. Maybe that was best for Gwen – into the question of dying and then into dying, like a fast plunge from a high dive. But it was her whole skein of life dropped in the middle. I always dimly wondered about internet passwords and such, how that would be (of course, I was wondering about for me), and, yes, I don’t have her passwords for her Open Diary or for her email; no one does; all her stuff in her email is locked away until the account lapses. She would not have planned that, and she did try to help with some things in those endless fast final days, but she couldn’t speak much, and most of them got away. It was a departure where she really had no time to even deal with her going. It was an interruption that was very much as if a hook reached out and jerked her off the stage, out of all the little concerns of her living, without even time to relinquish them, stage left.

***

I have taken Gwen out for dinner a couple of times. Dinner and great beer. I remember when Gwen came back from our visit to her home town of Hibbing, and we went to the Hub (Hopworks Urban Brewery), and the wonder of the food and the beer here in Portland reminded her why she would want to come back. And I loved to watch her enjoy. So. I have gone down with her to NePo 42 just down the avenue, where we had kept intending to stop off at some point, and with her I have discovered the beer offerings and their macaroni and cheese, which, the waitress told me, was fantastic with Aardvark Sauce, which you can only get in Portland, so we discovered that too… More recently we have gone down the hill to the Columbia Brewing Company and learned about that incredible banger sandwich and about, omigod, War Elephant.

Here’s the thing. I think of the flavor of the mouthful of food or drink, the glow, the tang, the sting, the swallow, I am as conscious of it as I can be, every nuance. I listen to that delightful delicate tiny gurgle back up behind my ears when I take a drink. I listen very hard. I am as aware of it as possible…

Maybe she can taste. Maybe she can hear… if I… (broadcast? share hard?)…

I can try.

Same with telling her about things (and knowing, hearing, who knows perhaps truly hearing each pauseless pause where she would have rolled her eyes, or spluttered, or chuckled, or said, “I know, right?”) Same with new movies, for sure with The Hobbit when it comes out. Same with anything.

And sometimes, as I am walking to the cemetery, or as I am walking back, I rub the tips of my thumb and forefinger together, and I listen very hard with my skin to how my fingerprints scrape over each other.

Here you go, girl.

And, of course, there’s…

***

I was talking in chat to my old high school friend Ivan – whose wife Katherine, who was in excellent health, died suddenly in bed with him of a massive heart attack at about the same time that Gwen first got her biopsy results back. So Ivan has about a three weeks’ jump on me in this stumbling, farcical process.

Ivan says he is some kind of a nonspecific there-is-Good-in-the-world deist, while Katherine was one of the hardest-line atheists you’d ever meet. (Of course, Gwen was a Christian, while I am the peculiar kind of agnostic that I am, with my various unlicensed wonderings underneath that.) Ivan is in the strange position of hoping his wife was wrong, or was not completely right.

And he was speaking of the feeling he has been having of being haunted, and about continuing to talk to Katherine, and thinking he can hear her responses, though not aloud. I had been telling him about going to see The Dark Knight Rises with Gwen. He said he had detected Katherine’s reactions to the movie too.

I wrote to him something that I had been thinking very much about:

It’s … oh, it’s like a graduate experiment in applied agnosticism – not the sort of atheist agnosticism where you settle on the material world and say “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence” and say you’re an agnostic, but the “high church” sort where you’re mostly trying to keep track of what you don’t know for sure, and make all your bets conscious *as bets,* and call all the describable doors open under the circumstances in which they are open, and keep track of all the possibilities there would be under various circumstances…

Really: What are you *responsible* for? Not what you’d bet is true, or what you’re sure is true – you’re responsible for what might be, the might-bes *that would matter.*

If she (your she, my she) is simply gone, then she needs nothing from us. That part isn’t our problem (or, it is only our problem).
If Gwen the Christian was completely right and is in Heaven, she’s safe and needs nothing from me. Even if it would mean I’d never see her, she’s safe and well, so I can be okay with that.
But if she is lingering, or listening… if she might be lonely, or still love you… any of the versions of that… well. That would be the possibility that you’d be responsible for, wouldn’t it? In case. You need not even specify. In case of in case. In case of her.

To do that, to be responsible for that, while still knowing nothing, believing unduly in nothing, *not knowing*, but to take care of it *anyway*…
… I did say it would be a graduate exercise.
(Also a strange, good illustration of the difference between belief and faith. Faith being the verb thing, the thing done.)

And it is incumbent upon me to say, at the end, I don’t know. I don’t know anything.

And then I said that I was going to go water the plants in the driveway and then walk over and read to my Gwen. Tony Hillerman. A chapter at a time.

Just in case.

I had explained all this to Gwen the same way, earlier – had talked it out, sitting by her grave. Which is why I had it so clear in mind to say to Ivan. The hard first days of setting the strategy for… our new long-distance relationship.

(Would I generally bet on a thoroughly material universe? Sure. Gwen understood the ambiguities and paradoxes in this for me as well as I did. Including how carefully little I think of my bets, however carefully I consider them. Which is to say, forget that bet, or don’t overconsider it. I have others.)

***

As I walk through the cemetery, especially when I’m coming through the main entrance, I keep finding small children, that Gwen could play with. I stop and talk to them a little, sometimes. I mean to stop by and say hi again – if I’m reading to Gwen, maybe I could stop sometime and read to them too – but I keep missing them when I come back through. It’s a big cemetery. Well, not big big, but big.

Most of the epitaphs on the flat markers are standardized – various Christian lines, or “too beloved to be forgotten” or equivalents – but there are some… One epitaph says, “You Can’t Win Them All!” There are musical instruments carved into some markers, including one drumset. There are photographs (ooo, there’s a thought). One says “BEYOND”… which is interesting, but no cigar for me, a little too austere, a little too much about death and not about the person. There is a stone that says that the occupant is the gr-gr-gr-gr-granddaughter of Daniel Boone. And there is a downright chatty farewell from a mother, I think, where the name and dates are rather small up at the top to make room, and I quite like that.

Elsewhere in the cemetery, in an older and possibly more serious section, I find that a husband and wife lived and died with the family name of Sinner. … I don’t know what I think of that.

I found Frank Ellis, King Of The Gypsies, whom Gwen and I had met before. He’s in a low above-ground crypt, next to his wife, along the main road in. I offered my respects and told him my girlfriend had just moved in and I would be grateful if he could show her the ropes. I nod to him every time I pass. (Gwen and I thought he was just a lighthearted gentleman with appreciative friends until I found a newspaper mention of a huge Gypsy funeral in Portland in the ’50s. No, it’s not just in fun.)

The marker of one young woman up near the entrance has a beautiful picture of her bare-shouldered, perhaps just out of the bath, holding her baby. When I was admiring it and congratulating the occupant, I remembered Gwen being just as enthralled. Best picture in the house.

***

Tony Hillerman actually palled, or his The Blessing Way did. I could feel a lack of clickage, whether me or Gwen or both, and I stopped.

Susan Cooper, on the other hand, her book The Dark Is Rising…

… well, it seems to be a hit. *smiles*

Almost eerily so, when I began. The only actual note of the supernatural in the entry, this is. I got a very live sense that someone was paying attention. I felt it tangibly, or closer to viscerally … and a curious thing was I was not sure that what I felt was Gwen; I could almost say that it did not feel like Gwen! (Which means nothing; I have no idea what Gwen’s discarnatespirit would feel like, possibly quite a different feeling than live Gwen.) If anyone else wanted to listen, though, it was fine with me. The dead, if something of them lingers in cemeteries, are rather out of the loop… and, though I’m sure they see many solemn visits and tears and graveside family conversations and to-the-stone soliloquys, I’m sure that they hardly ever get a visitor who reads aloud to a resident.

So, when I go, not quite every day, say every other day or more, I’ve been reading part of a chapter, or sometimes a full chapter. I think that, if I don’t run into any objections from the audience, I will read the whole of Cooper’s five-book series. (I’ve technically started with the second book, but, given that the Dark Is Rising series really has two first books that happen independently and only join up at the third, I see no awkwardness.) Gwen already knew the series, though, so I’d like to follow it with something else, or add something else to be read simultaneously, that would be new. I’ll have to see.

Like stroking the blades of grass on her grave mound so she might feel my touch. And everything else.

Just in case, for her. As I said above… Or also the selfish grieving lover’s side of the business – to coax her, if she may linger, to linger a bit longer, to not turn her attention away and absolutely elsewhere just yet.

And to be still doing for her, which makes me feel better – in fact, sometimes amazingly good – when I am walking to the cemetery, when I am talking and reading to her, and then when I am walking home. Taking care of Gwen.

That’s all right.

It’s a lovely place to read aloud, out there. With just the sound of the breeze.

***

Just so I’ve said – and it can be something like our little joke, Gentle Readers, but I don’t want to hear about it again: if I ever start actually hearing and seeing Gwen – like, if I am ever lucky enough to snap in just the right way for the right, just the right freestanding hallucination (or the other possibility) – I will never mention it in here, to you, or to anyone, or give the slightest hint. I can plan some contingencies in advance. That would be good luck, that I wouldn’t want any clever doctors interfering with. (And The Ghost And Mrs. Muir never looked hellish to me. Very much the reverse.)

In the meantime, two things:

Please stop by and leave a message for Gwen at her guestbook at the cemetery. If not for Gwen, for me. Part of the terrible ago-ing of Gwen’s death that I wrote about last time also came from watching the going-still of Gwen’s Caringbridge site, the phenomenal number of visitors and comments losing impetus and coasting down to nothing… And I like what Joel did with the guestbook – and I did tell Gwen about it – and I like the idea of people who cared about Gwen leaving her written messages, even if she’d never know.

And:

Don’t miss that burger at Stanich’s, if you get the chance.