Sey Young: Memories, cemeteries offer solace

Secrets safe, decades later

There is a story -- I have never told it -- why would I? The story is from my distant past. I didn't want to tell it when younger, and it's almost forgotten. Death can be that way.

The story concerns a graveyard. It was in the woods near the back yard of the house where I grew up. My parents never saw it. I never showed them. I picked the location myself. Cleared the ground with a hoe and shovel I took from our garage. Dug the first grave. Solemnly placed the first corpse in the dark space. There would be many more.

Now lest you feel uncomfortable, cemeteries provide a vital function in our culture and society. Nathaniel Hawthorne observed: "The founders of a new colony, whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery." And many forget that Lincoln's famous Gettysburg Address -- all 272 words and considered to be one of the greatest speeches in American history -- was a dedication for a new cemetery. But I wasn't thinking about Lincoln that first time.

My home growing up was filled with an assortment of pets. There were hamsters, turtles, chickens, turkeys, lambs, quail, more chickens, cats, dogs, guinea pigs, frogs but positively, absolutely no snakes -- because a fellow must draw the line somewhere. Death naturally came in fits and starts. As a little boy, when our family dog Missy died, my dad "took care" of the deceased body. How or where he would not say. It was the death of my little hamster Teddy that necessitated action on my part that he got a dignified burial.

He was placed in a shoebox after being elaborately wrapped in tissue and buried in that clearing behind my house. I lined the top of the grave with quartz rocks I collected. Soon there would be many more. There would be my cat Sugar who died suddenly after just one year, assorted frogs and turtles, my little lamb my dad brought home who unfortunately didn't last a week (thereby not living long enough to garner a name). There was my pet chicken Louisa who lived in our basement and ate table scraps in our kitchen -- but only, I might add, when my father was working at his desk in the living room and not looking. And there were my pet roosters Huey, Dewey and Louie, which I taught to fly to my extended arm whenever I raised it, always to the amazement of friends.

As I got older and began making that awkward transition to becoming a teenager, part of me became embarrassed that I kept a pet cemetery for such things as quail and turtles. But it also was a source of peace for me, kind of a remembrance of the love and joy they all had brought me in different ways. Even as girls and other activities consumed my attention, I would regularly tend to the upkeep of my secret cemetery.

We moved from that house and town when I was 14 years old, and it would be 30 years before I would venture back, curious to see my old house but strangely wanting to visit again my old friends who stayed behind as well. All was gone, the house, the yard, and the once hidden graveyard now buried under the pavement of a large warehouse.

Was the past made to be forgotten? Slowly erased? Because sometimes, nothing is more present. As the poet Mary Elizabeth Frye observed: "Do not stand at my grave and cry. I am not there. I did not die. Of quiet birds in circled flight. I am the soft stars that shine at night."

I can live with that.

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