When The Dead Don’t Speak and the Living Won’t
Mark Wallace’s grave, Arlington Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia, USA. Visited on May 10, 2013
I am told I may discern the fragmentation of the universe by observing how boulders become rocks, how rocks crumble to pebbles, pebbles to dust. They mean for me to remove myself from society and live alone among nature (a la Tu Fu or Wittgenstein) where I will surely understand how time expands and the horizon grows in a way that approximates the infinite.
I am meant to meditate on the sky, not on boulders, rocks, pebbles, dust. As the subject of my poems, I am meant to choose the expanse, not these headstones lined in rows among these manicured lawns, shaped and smoothed and inscribed. Not that I won’t learn the same lesson – either way, death is still the subject — but these stones tell a different story, one concentrated on individual lives, complete with DOB-slash-DOD.
About MARK WALLACE, my mother and her siblings rarely spoke or speak. When they did or do, it was and is in reverent tones. He was charismatic. He was a natural born leader. He got along with everyone. He didn’t deserve to die.
These conversations only ever took and take place in front of me during Thanksgiving, which my whole life has been the obligatory family gathering. With age, I have grown to appreciate these assemblies, in part because Thanksgiving always takes place at my parents’ house, and as I grow older, my childhood home has become more and more unfamiliar to me. Every year, it becomes more museum-like. Every object is invested with increasing significance, seems to hold memories and meanings beyond their function.
One of these objects, an oil portrait of my maternal grandfather, has been hanging in our house my whole life, but I only really noticed it the year Uncle Pat un-suspended it it from the wall and held it up to his face. There he sat, head of the table, the portrait a mask. He spoke as if he were his father.
It was a joke. Everyone laughed. I laughed. I thought it was funny, and I also thought it was strange. Strange how I never before gave six second’s thought about that portrait, which had been hanging there all my life, its line of sight the chairs and couch where I would sit and read for hours. All that time, it could, if it were conscious, watch me passively, record my behavior, judge or not judge me — and I would never know, either way. It has always been there but in the background. The only reason think about it now is because that night was the first time I ever observed my family make fun of my grandfather.
The pandemonium around losing someone you never knew is paramount. It is also easy to miss and just as easy to ignore. But I have never been able to ignore my intuition, no matter how frustratingly it communicates!
How did I fail to make the connection? How my family spoke and speak about Mark Wallace and how they spoke and speak about their parents? Never, not once, in our presence, did or do they say something critical. Nary a bad word!
What bothered and bothers me?
I knew my grandfather. Not well. He died when I was six, but my memories of him are incompatible with the hagiography promulgated after his death. A rascal, they implied, for sure, but fundamentally a wonderful person.
Not my experience!
But we discount the experiences of children, don’t and do we?
I was six. What did or do I know?
Here's what I know — there are no saints. The stories we tell about someone after they die tend not to be true.
My family’s myths lie between the spectrum of false statements and omissions. The stories I heard growing up skirt those poles so skillfully they seemed natural, as if nobody who dies has ever been complicated. Likewise, in my family, it’s easy to say or do something and find out after that fact that you made a mistake. I only now recognize the patterns. I am embarrassed to say it has taken me this long.
The crossover happens when I tell my mom I went to visit her brother’s grave. I think she’ll be pleased that I’ve made an effort to demonstrate a commitment to family. That has always been the unsaid judgement against me, that I don’t care about the family. I expect her to open up and share some stories. Instead, I receive a muted response.
So what am I to make of this muted reply, the too-obvious disinterest in talking about a painful subject, as if it’s my fault for bringing it up, as if I’ve committed a faux pax by visiting a relative’s grave?
Lesson learned: You cannot win the battle by fighting the battle.
The only fact I know is that he died in a car accident while he was on leave.