The forgotten dead call to me.
I know it sounds creepy, but I can’t pass a graveyard without hearing them.
I’m not one of those special people like in The Sixth Sense or Stir of Echoes (great movie, by the way). I don’t see dead people or hear them speak. Not verbally, anyway.
I feel them in a different way — especially in tumbled-down old graveyards that seem abandoned.
For a while, I lived down the road from a graveyard that stood alone on one half of a city block. The church attached to it had been relocated ages ago, and the 300-year-old graves always looked forlorn.
Someone trims the grass between the graves. Some decrepit caregiver — the son of a son of a son of a parishioner from so long ago — does a half-ass job.
It’s called “perpetual care.”
Tree boughs and leaves have fallen and rotted all around the graves.
I know that under each gravestone is a person, a body, into which the air of life once breathed.
Each person had a name.
A birthday.
A mother.
A father.
The oldest areas of the graveyards are filled with tiny grave markers.
In the right light, I can see the birth and death dates are just a few months…
