Well, I’m here. Just me and all these dead people. Dead bodies, anyway; guess there’s a lot of contention about where the actual people are. Heaven? Hell? Nowhere? Returned to the Eternal Cosmos?
One of these bodies, though, is my father’s. And I’m here to find the few unmarked cubic feet of earth that have covered him for the past thirty years.
What I need is a dousing rod. One that registers a DNA match.
“Kevin Donoghue? Your son Robert is here for you.”
I hear no answer. Good thing, really.
I do have a map they gave me at the town hall, folded and somewhat mangled, in the pocket of my jacket. “Lot 287” is my father’s grave, they’d said. But I feel like it would be cheating to use it. I mean, having let his grave go unvisited for years requires some penance, some proof of sincerity. No map; instead, I’ll just walk around and see what calls to me. So to speak. I have the whole afternoon, the day is lovely and the cemetery small, and I feel like strolling anyway. I can always pull out the map if I need it.
As I survey the headstones stretching out from my corner of these holy grounds, I wonder how much hallowing it takes to compensate for neglect. The mid-afternoon autumn sun feels comforting, relaxing, and I allow my mind to stretch back through time.
~
Once, I had taken religion seriously, accepting fully that Christianity was the path to God. The one path to God. Dad’s funeral had taken place in the church where I had been baptized, where I had been brought every Sunday (and on many other days) since then. At the age of seven, I had gazed stupidly at what looked like my father but wasn’t quite my father, laid out like a man-sized doll inside his coffin. The pale face, the thinning hair combed straight back, the rouged cheeks—none of it had seemed like Daddy. I knew I was supposed to cry, so I did, but I didn’t understand very well what had happened.
A few days before, my teacher had called me to the back of the classroom and out into the hallway.
“Bobby, you need to go home now. Your neighbor Mrs. Silva is here for you.”
“Why?”
“Your mother will explain when you get there.”
And Mom had explained, as well as she could, that Daddy had died. She didn’t mince words, though she was gentle. She cried as she told me, which made me cry too. My pet mole had died last summer after three days in its cage, and I’d buried it in the back yard. I understood that I couldn’t see it again.
But now, did this mean Daddy wasn’t coming home? That’s sort of what Mom was saying. But why not? What had she done with him? What had God done with him? Would I really never see him again? This couldn’t be true. It just couldn’t. My daddy had been like a lesser god to me. He’d known everything; I hadn’t, and he’d loved me anyway.
Desperate to understand, I’d listened carefully as Mum and the kindly Mrs. Silva had tried to explain what would happen at the church, and afterward. But when they got to the part about putting Daddy into the ground as I had with the mole, I would have none of it.
“No!” I remember shouting. “No! You can’t do that! I won’t let you!”
I refused to listen any more, and so after the church service Mrs. Silva took me home, and I never saw where they buried my father.
Within the year, my mother shook the dust of that small New England town from her feet, and we moved to Florida, of all places, where we stayed for a short time at the home of people my father had known. Their land included a tidal inlet that reeked of rotting things at low tide, and at high tide the dark water hid the prickly carapaces of horseshoe crabs that skittered disconcertingly away from my feet if I happened to step too close to them or—worse—if I stepped directly onto them.
I can’t remember how long we stayed with these friends. Too long, probably. And then my mother rented a house for us. And then we moved again, and again, as though seeking something always just out of reach.
Almost every year, close to the anniversary of Dad’s death, Mom would muse aloud, “One day I’ll put a stone on your father’s grave.” Then she would sigh wistfully and, often, add, “How I miss him.” Once, encouraged by her mention of him, I asked why we never visited the place where he was buried. Her tortured face, and the sight of her back as she disappeared into her bedroom for two hours, told me that she could mention him, but I could not. I never asked again, and eventually I even stopped wondering.
Finally Mom found a place where she wanted to stay. I was eleven years old at the time, and it didn’t dawn on me that what my mother had been looking for was a church where she felt at home. And this was the year she told me that what she wanted, more than anything else—though I wasn’t clear on her reasons—was for me to enter the Catholic priesthood.
~
Despite the autumn sun, an uncomfortable shivering passes through me. Time to move.
Walking slowly, eyes on the ground, I ignore graves with headstones. The woman at the town hall had said there should be a small, granite square at one corner of the grave with “287” carved into it. It will be flat to the ground, so I’ll have to look carefully. At first I concentrate only on what’s near my feet—late-blooming wildflowers, ant-hills. But soon I’m back in the past again.
~
I couldn’t say what had happened to end my mother’s plans for me. Whatever the reason, I went from a young boy seriously looking at a life committed to God, to a teenager who—like a true Christian—believed that if I were no longer Christian, then I must be an atheist. After all, Christianity was the one true religion, or so I’d been led to understand. So obviously, atheism must be the only alternative. This meant I was an atheist.
It started around the time I turned fourteen. Kneeling in church, head bowed, one hand clutching the prayer beads left me by my grandmother—garnet beads, to represent the blood of Christ—the dichotomy of how our spirits should soar and yet how they should be submissive confused me. Some of the work I’d done for my confirmation preparation had raised ideas and questions for which doctrine seemed to have no good responses, no good answers, and these questions still troubled me. Why were there three very different creation stories, one after the other, right there in the beginning of the Bible’s first book? If Jesus was “the way, the truth, and the light,” and if the only way to the Father was through the Son, then where were the souls of Abraham, and Moses, and Noah, to name just a few? And if this message from Jesus was so very important, why had God let thousands of years go by before introducing Jesus to His chosen people?
Gradually, my internal focus on the church slipped away from me. It happened as subtly as if someone with ulterior motives had replaced the toy bear in the arms of a sleeping child with something organic and unrecognizable, something that rendered a very different type of comfort.
Without at first understanding its significance, I discovered body-building. I perused the magazine racks displaying male bodies, muscles glistening. Through my teen years I watched in narcissistic fascination as biceps began to stand out on my upper arms, as thick, broad curves of power swelled beneath the skin covering my thighs. The magazine photographs, I believed, appealed to me as inspiration for the sculpting of my own physique. When they aroused me, I believed it to be with ambition, and this seemed natural enough; at least, I didn’t question it.
Then there was the photograph of that one particular man. Something about the face gazing up from the page made the edges of my vision blur, made my breath come in quick pants, made me retreat to my bedroom for private, pseudo worship services at the feet of my new god: orgasm.
I tried to tell my mother how I felt. I couldn’t possibly reconcile a life of priestly dedication with this carnal, passionate obsession with the bodies of men whose names I didn’t know. I could hardly say this to my mother, so I could say nothing to dispel her confusion. I couldn’t tell her that applying to seminaries was not just an exercise in futility; it was completely empty of meaning, of possibility. So I procrastinated, despite my mother’s pleading reminders, despite her going so far as to complete a few of the applications and submit them for me, signing “Robert P. Donoghue” herself.
I would be no priest. Instead of buying religious texts and philosophical treatises, I took home more magazines with male body-builders, and then magazines with male fornicators. It was no longer sin since I’d lost my faith, I told myself, though it still felt rather like it.
Finally I grew brave enough to do more than look at photographs. It was autumn then, too. I was eighteen, nearly nineteen. I’d moved out of my mother’s house, but I hadn’t yet started my college education, a pale and insipid, if necessary, substitution for seminary. My birthday was approaching, and I’d decided to give myself the biggest present anyone could ever give. I would give myself to myself.
On that day, evening, really, I put on my tightest jeans, loving the snugness at my crotch. I tucked in a white cotton shirt and unbuttoned it to about the middle of my chest, and I pulled on my leather boots. I walked myself into a bar I’d only heard about, I ordered a beer, and I began looking around. I turned down the first three men who approached. I was looking for someone special. To be honest, I was also scared silly. So I was waiting for someone I couldn’t refuse.
I didn’t refuse Steve.
Later, after my first taste of what sex really was, Steve saw the crucifix, a gift from my father for my sixth birthday. Then, it had been on a slender chain. Now it was more firmly suspended on heavier silver links around my neck.
“You serious about this stuff?” he asked.
“Nah.” Flush with the feeling of having experienced real life for the first time, I felt like I could say anything. Do anything. “That’s just something my dad gave me a long time ago. Sort of sentimental, I guess.” I reached for Steve’s mouth with mine, the novelty and wonder of this simple act sending electric tingles from breastbone to fingernails. “It’s not important.”
Steve didn’t last, of course, but that wasn’t important, either. There were others. For a time I felt a need to know them all. In the biblical sense of the word. I was a new person. A new man. I became Robert; I was Bobby no longer.
~
Two rows finished. About seventy-five graves, I figure, looking over the ground I’ve covered. Despite my rambling remembrances, I feel confident I’d have noticed “287” on a stone corner. I start down the next row.
~
About a year after Steve, my mother discovered the present I had given myself. She dropped in unexpectedly at my tiny apartment and was criticizing the mess as I tried not to react, struggling to keep from telling her to let me live my own life, wanting and not wanting to shock her with proof of how little she knew me. Before I could stop her, she picked up a pile of papers, and out from the middle of the stack—slippery because of the glossy paper—slid a magazine. On the cover, two bare-chested men were kissing, tongues visibly involved.
“Robert Patrick Donoghue.” She stared fixedly at the vile thing, held gingerly between thumb and finger. “What is this?”
Even now, when I relive this scene in my mind, I feel the powerful mix of fear and bravado that still causes my ears to ring. At the time it had nearly drowned out my own response: “It’s mine, Mum. It’s me.”
“You? What do you mean, it’s you?”
“I’m gay.”
Her tone could have cut granite. “I see. So deserting your calling wasn’t enough.”
“It was never my calling. It was something you wanted.”
Her stunned expression froze the room, the air, all action. She stared at me. I stared at her. Maybe ten seconds went by. Maybe ten minutes. Say something! I wanted to shout. Anything! Tell me what a terrible son I am!
Without a word, she dropped the magazine on the floor, turned, and walked out. Just before the door slammed, she did speak. “You are no son of mine.”
She didn’t mean it. Not exactly, anyway. But she made it abundantly clear, as soon as she could bring herself to speak to me again, that things were not the same. I was not to be “her son, the priest.” I was “her son, the homosexual.” We talked about it, or tried to, more than once. The conversations always ended in frustration and stalemate.
“Mom, God made me. So He made me this way.”
“God gives us all our crosses to bear. You are not bearing yours!”
“Jesus never said anything about—”
“So you know better than the Pope, now? You know what was in Jesus’ heart better than God’s earthly representative?”
I’m gay; that’s her cross to bear. I must remain chaste; that’s mine. She is bearing her cross…. That’s how it always ended. We spoke less and less over time, seeming to have less and less to say.
Then last week, on my birthday, I received an envelope from her. In it was a living will, specifying what she would and would not approve of in the event she became too ill to determine her own medical fate. Also in it was a note saying that she did not want a funeral, did not want a coffin, did not want to be buried. She wanted to be cremated, as cheaply as possible. “I want no urn, nothing kept. Just scatter the ashes wherever you can. Wherever it’s legal to do such things.”
Wherever I can. Mulling over the possibilities—beach, lake, mountaintop—it finally occurred to me that I should scatter them, if I followed her request, where my father’s body rested.
So here I am, looking for that spot, preparing myself for the inevitable, though it has not yet occurred. She’s still alive and living many miles away. I wonder if she’s been here since the funeral. I laugh, a kind of barking sound, at the idea that there could be a headstone here after all, that maybe she’d put it here some years ago without saying anything to me. I decide to glance at headstones, just in case. This slows me down, but I have plenty of time. And there’s the map, if I grow weary of wandering.
Eight rows done, now; maybe a third of the cemetery covered. I stand at the end of the row, under a tall pine, watching white whiffs of cloud skitter across the sky as a chilly breeze ruffles my hair. I like the ruffling, but the breeze makes me shiver; even so, no map, not yet. Wander a little more.
Her insistence on no funeral makes me wonder if she’s wandered away from the church, too. Would she tell me? I doubt it. What is a grave, though? The dead can’t appreciate them, I’m sure of that much. But if my living father had known his grave would be unmarked and neglected—the thought is too depressing. And yet, what difference does it make, really? Why is it sad?
I muse, as my eyes fall upon graven names that mean nothing to me, about my miniature pilgrimage, this odd penance. Despite the impetus my mother’s note provided, today’s work is between my father and me. The grave, whatever it represents, has been neglected long enough, and the neglect has been mine as much as anyone’s.
“Donoghue.” The name on the stone catches first my eye and then my breath. But no, it’s a family plot, presided over by Liam and Mary. Nothing to do with me as far as I know. Lovely stone, though. I walk past, and then, on a small square of granite, I see “104.”
What if I find the grave? What will I do? I haven’t worked that out yet. One step at a time.
I suppose one thing I want to do is mark my father’s resting place with something other than a number. I’d seen a brief verse I liked, by the Scottish poet James Montgomery: “Tis not the whole of life to live, nor all of death to die.” Into this sentiment I read my own philosophy. It seems to imply the bridge I believe in, the bridge that connects physical and spiritual. But would my father agree with Montgomery, with me? If he knew me now, if he knew what I am and what I am not, would I be as dead to him as he is to me?
I had been wrong, as a teenager, to assume that I was an atheist. The term doesn’t apply to me. Never has. There is a spiritual world, or a spiritual side to life. I feel certain about that. What I’m not even close to certain about is what that mystery is, how it can be, or how to connect with it. But connection with it is what I crave.
Before I’m aware of it, I’m speaking aloud, to myself, to my father—as if I could encourage him to love me, to be glad I’m his son. “Saul was a fanatic. St. Paul was no different. Saul was a fanatic.…” In my thoughts, behind this vindicating, chanted litany, I describe Saul/Paul the person, how he divided rather than united Jesus’ followers. I beg my father to understand.
And then I’m not talking to my father any longer, but to Saul. I condemn his need to be right at all costs, the results of which have ruined lives and lost souls. My anger propels me. I walk faster and faster, wishing myself back in time, or Saul forward, so that I can throttle him.
Suddenly I realize I haven’t been watching for numbers. I stand still, eyes closed.
I want my faith back. Or some faith, anyway. Here in this cemetery, surrounded by headstone after headstone with crosses and angels and praying hands, I long for the church. But despite my logical protestations that Jesus would not have condemned me for being what God had made me, that God does not make mistakes, whenever I try to worship in church, I feel as though I’ve put my shirt on over a sign that says “Unclean.” As though I’ve merely silenced with wadded tissue the little bell with which I’m obliged to warn the godly of my approach.
I’m not sure, now, whether I lost my faith, or my faith lost me. But today, it’s my father I seek. I find I need a device—something to help me separate my earthly father from “God the Father.” I’ve confused the two in my thoughts too often. So I try to humanize him, to think of the dead man buried nearby as Kevin.
I go back to where I think my rant started. On my left I see “254.” I stare at it, arms wrapped around my ribs; it won’t be far, now.
At the end of the next row, a darkness shows where a freshly-dug grave awaits an inhabitant. I stand beside it and imagine myself at Kevin’s burial. The coffin is lowered in, and my mother tosses dirt onto it with one hand while the other clutches a handkerchief to her face. It’s a scene I didn’t witness, but I know enough to draw it for myself. I kneel beside the hole and sift through the piled earth with one hand, and as the dirt falls through my fingers I’m left with a few stones. Pebbles, really. Seven of them. Odd; that’s how old I’d been.
I stand and gaze for a few seconds at the stones in my hand, admiring their differences and similarities, my eyes catching late afternoon sunlight in an occasional spot of mica. I pocket these and bend down again. I sift and save, sift and save until I’ve collected fifty-nine pebbles, the number of beads on a rosary. Most of them are small, but my pockets sag under the weight just the same. I tighten my belt a notch, turn, and continue my quest.
I’m very cold, now. The sun is nearly gone, and although the wind has died there’s a bite to the air I feel sharply through the thin jacket I wear.
Halfway down the next row I see it. 287. No headstone, no way of knowing whether Kevin’s body really lies beneath the surface. I must take it on faith that I’ve been given the correct information. I kneel dead center on the plot, expecting—craving—a feeling of rightness, of connection, of resolution. Of peace.
It does not come. I feel nothing but cold.
My hands are shaking so hard that it takes longer than it should to set the pebbles out at what I hope is the head of the grave. But the shivering is more than cold. There’s a fear.
Of what? Of being in a graveyard as darkness falls? Hardly that.
My fear is of confrontation. I’m confronting my father for the first time in thirty years. I mean, Kevin. But maybe the other Father, too.
I could leave now, I tell myself. No reason to stay. I’ve found the grave, I could find it again, and I’ve laid out a makeshift rosary in the hope that both fathers would think it appropriate. If I run back to the car and turn the heat on high, I could be warm again very soon.
I finger the first pebble without picking it up.
“Hail Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with thee.” My voice is shaking, too, not just my body. There’s trembling everywhere: hands, shoulders, even stomach; shaking all over. “Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.”
I take a deep breath, struggling to calm myself, willing my voice to be stronger. It grows louder with the effort. “Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death.” My head falls forward. “Amen.”
I finger the next bead and begin the chant again.
Fifty-nine beads later, Hail Mary and Our Father echoing in my brain, I’m still kneeling, legs frozen painfully in place, a stone piercing its way into my shin. Here is the peace I’d wanted. The calm I’d craved. Slowly, gingerly, I ease my body off the ground, massaging stiff joints and rubbing the shin bone that must now have an indentation the size of a small marble. It’s almost totally dark.
I listen to the silence, relishing it. And then, in a corner of my being, there is disquiet. Something is still missing. Or, not missing—calling to me. Needing to be included.
I lift my phone from my pocket and touch the place on the screen that will connect me to my mother.
OR:
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Beautiful story. The gesture of saying the rosary with pebbles seems to connect his childhood Catholic faith to an earth-centered, pagan, or experiential kind of spirituality that he is reaching for as an adult. It also reminds me of the Jewish practice of placing stones on a grave marker when you visit it. Some truths are bigger than any one religion, I suppose!