(This was first published in The Times and The News-Star in July 2015.)

I am the only person in the cemetery. The only person still living, anyway. That I can see.

But just as anyone else does — ever been alone in a cemetery? — I can sense a lot more.

Attended the funeral six hours ago. Skipped the graveside. Everyone who came is long gone now. This includes the grave keepers. They were the last to leave, the last ones here before me. They did a good job. I did not know where I would find it, but here it is, a neatly manicured mound, and flowers arranged tightly around it, northwest corner, nothing behind it but open grass and the trees and the birds talking lightly, and only now and then. Another day at the office for those guys, but that’s probably a good thing. Life goes on.

But life doesn’t go on for everyone. That’s why there are places like this, places where you stare at a manicured grave, and wonder why.

Within 30 steps in each direction is another of my friends. Two are over there. That was a tough day. It was on my birthday too. Never forget it.

Another is just a step from them. Her youth is what hurts me. We will all end up here, but few of us that young. There’s no reason for it, not really. “Just one of those things.” But just one of those things that can hardly be tossed away with such a trite explanation. Still, knowing better, we say things like that when things like this happen: “Well, it was just one of those things.”

If you boot a ground ball, it’s just one of those things. This is a whole different ballgame. So you shake your head and see that back this way is…something I’ll never forget. Some one I’ll never forget.

Because back this way is one of my employers when I was in school. I am the age now that he was when he came here. We talked a few days before that, a short conversation, him asking my permission to do something. I don’t know why. But I’m sure he knew then that it would be the last time we talked, and he wanted to give me one more thing to remember. I will always love him for that.

In front of him, one of my favorite teachers. He was in his 90s, wild and crazy in a professorial way, and few days pass that I don’t think of him. I keep one of my books opened to one of his favorite poems by one of his favorite friends, a man who was buried years before he was born. He died not knowing how much he helped me, because I could never be poet enough to tell him. “It’s just one of those things…”

Their faces, these gone friends of mine, are easy to see and their voices still very real. Only my teacher was what we would call old; the rest, not at all.

And now here is another friend, today, gone unexpectedly. The last time I saw him he was solidly in his element, walking across a ball field, more at home than straw under a pine tree or a fish in water. He had more time, much more. That’s what anyone would have thought. Like so many of these others here. More time.

But another of his friends reminded me the next day of an eternal truth that should make these times less surprising. He said, “We don’t get to pick and choose.”

And we don’t. They would still be here if we did. Maybe I would call them tonight. Eat with them tomorrow. Maybe they would make me laugh. Maybe they would just pass me on the street, and wave. And even that would be enough. I wish I had never taken one of those waves for granted.

Years ago in a story I read by the late Mississippian Willie Morris — and if you haven’t read him, I hope you will, something like “North Toward Home” or “Terrains of the Heart” — he wrote of being in his hometown graveyard of Yazoo City, I think on Christmas Eve, wandering among his long-ago American Legion coaches and English teachers and parents of the boys and girls he grew up with. It’s odd to feel as if you are in that story. But we all have been. And one day we will be the person that the person walking and remembering thinks of.

So that thought makes me wonder: Am I prepared to be here, to be the person still as death, instead of the person walking, and wandering, and wondering?

I am in part to blame for my friends being here. That, I have to admit. That’s what we chose a long time ago, when a perfect world wasn’t perfect enough, not for us. And so, the first of many cemeteries came to be, just like this one.

People will tell you that dying is a part of living. I know what they mean. But it’s not. Not really. It’s not supposed to be this way. It didn’t start out this way. Wasn’t the plan. We made choices. We chose poorly. And so we get a world that’s broken. None of us was made for this, for a place where your loved ones are left behind, where flowers fade and grass grows uncaring around marble stones.

I do not have enough faith to be an atheist. This cemetery is where we might all stay, chained and bound in death, if not for hope and grace and a finished work. I choose to believe in hope, and not that me and Elvis and a pine tree and any bird singing in the trees shading a cemetery are from the same two cells, randomly thrown together — out of nothing? — eons ago.

This is no theological thesis. If it were, I could not write it. What I know about theology you could wrap in a fortune cookie, and this question we all have to answer deserves more thought than a rolling of the dice.

It’s just that in this cemetery, looking at these names, remembering these faces and voices, it’s much easier for a regular guy like me to believe in a love so extreme that this place where I stand will not be the final word, that a cemetery will not be the end of it all, but only the end of something, and the beginning of something unspeakably better that what we’ve known, the “something” we were truly built for.

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