Homewood At Last

Pittburgh, PA, More than a week ago now.

On a balmy summer night, four of us bike out to Homewood Cemetery in Pittsburgh to look for whatever we may find. Our friends tell us that cemeteries have become the new urban wildlife refuges. People come in occasionally to bury someone or to visit a grave, but most of the time the cemetery is alone, and living non-human creatures can enjoy resting in peace alongside the dead humans. Our friends have spotted a fox, deer and many squirrels, birds, rabbits.

We bike to a tiny swamp on the fringes of the cemetery where Sugata takes pictures of the frogs that line the perimeter, their heads as green as lily pads, their bodies as brown as muddy water. We listen to red-winged Blackbirds and relax. After some time I become restless and ask to see some of the more interesting graves. (I had noticed on an earlier quick tour that the gravestones seemed competitively large and ornate. Several big names out there I’m told: Heinz, Benedum, Frick, Mellon). A-- took us to see her favorite gravesite, a towering Celtic Cross right next to a weeping willow, the perfect place for a summer evening picnic.

We wander the graveyard until dusk, looking at the sculptures and stones. One sculpture is of a father holding his young daughter. I read the caption: “Motherless.” I am motherless too, though it did not happen to me so young. Seeing this sculpture sets stage for me to think about my own experience with death and the way I’ve come to think about it. There are tombstones and sculptures that try hard to impress, but among them I do not find many that speak to me. I finally chance upon one with a caption that most accurately describes how I have come to feel since losing my mother: "To live in hearts we leave behind is not to die."

I am not so concerned with an afterlife, but neither am I impressed with the significance of physical death. I have memories of my mother, and I carry within myself something of her genes and her experience. In this way, I have not lost her. I am also not the only one to carry memories. I can still learn more of her through others who have known her. I don’t know how to describe how this feeling finally came to settle on me some time ago. People find their comfort from various sources.

As it grows dark, we watch, tiny lights, blink on and rise, then fade a few inches above the grass. 


Fireflies. 


Hundreds of them as the night darkens. We decide to take one last tour of the cemetery on our bikes.

The dark surrounds us. The warm air caresses us. Our heads turn this way as we pass through the shadows of graves and trees. Swarming around us are these tiny lights, these moving lights. How surreal is the ordinary. We are alive. The cemetery is alive. A raccoon ambles behind a tall stone and disappears and before we know it, we have finished the loop and arrived back at the field where we started. It is getting late. We have had a long day. 

And though it be time to depart, the lights keep rising.