What owning a cemetery taught me about love

“This is a completely crazy place — look at those graves!” A young, well-heeled couple stood at a window of the renovated church where my partner and I had found ourselves on a Sunday afternoon. The man apparently didn’t like what he was seeing.

Outside, a ramshackle cemetery ringed the church, its worn gravestones toppled this way and that like fallen dominos. Those whose inscriptions were not smudged out by time revealed little of the people buried beneath.

Nearby, a tractor buzzed lazily around a hayfield, the aroma of the newly cut grass wafting through the church’s open windows. Even with its pews and stained glass removed, it felt somehow sanctified.

“There’s just no separation,” the young woman mused. “I want to love it, but that cemetery is just depressing.”

“The only good part about owning this house would be that we would be all set for Halloween,” the man smirked. They quickly left.

My boyfriend, on the other hand, was not put off by the cemetery. He was entranced. “I like the graves,” he said. “Think of all those stories.” I didn’t know it was possible to fall more in love with him, but I did that day. 

Despite being featured on the Zillow Gone Wild Instagram account, the house sat on the market for nearly a year with no offers, its price steadily dropping. I kept coming to see it with my boyfriend, drawn by some connection I only dimly understood. Perhaps it was because death was very much on my mind.

I’d recently turned 50 and had become preoccupied with what it would feel like to attend my father’s funeral. He’d been the man I’d most loved and hated in my life, and now he was dying. Years earlier, after a series of unresolved conflicts and missed birthdays, I’d lost contact with him. Already feeling like our relationship was one-sided, I’d conducted an experiment: If I stopped calling him, how long would it take him to call me? The answer turned out to be never. I hadn’t intended our relationship to end, but when a year passed, then two, I had to admit that it probably had.

For most of my life, I’d idolized my father. Nothing mattered more to me than his approval, even adopting his sneering disdain for my mother to please him. But after I had kids of my own, to my surprise, my father took little interest. “When they can hold a conversation, I’ll be happy to call,” he joked. My mother, on the other hand, sent them artfully curated book collections and handmade valentines. Did I have it wrong all along?

Then, after her own health scare, my mother said she had something to tell me.

“There are things you never knew,” she said. “Your dad used to hurt me during our conflicts. He would grab me. Hard.” Reflexively, she rubbed her upper arms. 

“How hard?’ I asked, realizing immediately it was the wrong question. The instinct to defend him was hard to shake.

“Enough that I had to wear long sleeves to cover up the bruises,” she responded, softly.

I’d already come to view the way he had recruited me into his contempt of her during their almost 20-year marriage with revulsion. Still, when she disclosed the physical abuse, I had the vertiginous feeling of falling. Was my whole childhood a fiction? Sometimes that worry makes me feel like I’m parenting without a map.

In third grade, my eldest daughter earned a place in her school-wide spelling bee.

“I don’t want your help!” she cried when I tried to quiz her on the way to school. “I’m not even sure I want to do it.”

Do it? When I qualified for a regional spelling bee at 11, my father prepared elaborate flash cards and put me on a strict schedule for weeks until letters and words filled my dreams. I could still feel the intoxicating fizz of his attention, and the sticky shame after I got knocked out in the second round. When my daughter’s turn came up to go on stage, she turned on her heels and marched back to her seat beside me.

“What are you doing?!” I hissed.

“I changed my mind,” she said, crossing her arms.

“Get on stage! Hurry, it’s still your turn!” I could hear the shrillness in my voice. In the silence that followed, I realized that nearly everyone in the auditorium had heard it too. I sat down heavily, a lump in my throat.

“I hate you! You didn’t even ask me why!” my daughter screamed at me later that day.

She was right; it hadn’t even occurred to me. My darkest fear is that I am not all that different from my father. That dread is especially hard in the moments I find myself acting exactly like him. 

My complicated history with my father has made it difficult to let any man in. Whenever anyone got too close, I would sabotage things. Most of the time, though, I just picked the wrong men; it made being disappointed easier. Deep down, I believed I did not deserve better. Then I fell hard for a man who made me feel, for the first time in my life, both known and loved. Of course, it made me want to end things with him immediately.

When I tried to shake him though, he held tight. Even so, our relationship had a certain tenuousness. How do you create a life with someone when you are in your 50s and not going to have children together or get married? What did we have that was just ours? The closer we became, the more I felt completely out on a limb.

“Let’s do this,” my boyfriend said about the house after one last look on a bitterly cold winter day. Rain puddled around the gravestones, making them seem as if they might sink into the ground. “Halloween will be great,” he said. 

We moved in on a beautiful clear spring morning and I promptly picked a huge fight with him.

“Can you please lower your voice?” he asked, trying to de-escalate.

What I heard was: “I want to break up.”

“What? No,” he sighed. “Here’s how this works, Sarah — I am staying. We are in this together.” He brought my fingers to his mouth and kissed them.

In high school, we read “Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” in philosophy class. “On a cycle, the frame is gone,” Robert Pirsig wrote. “You’re completely in contact with it all. You’re in the scene, not just watching it anymore, and the sense of presence is overwhelming.”

Living beside a cemetery is a lot like riding a motorcycle — the sense of presence is overwhelming. Mourners make their way onto our property where they kneel beside their chosen headstone. Then there are the Girl Scouts who plant flags on holidays, the volunteers from the cemetery nonprofit who prop up the stones that have toppled over, and the curious passersby. “I feel like you are taking care of my grandfather,” one woman told me, giving me a hug.

I look out on the crumbling graves while drinking my morning coffee, mist rising from the yard, and feel a swell of love for them. Cemetery ownership can be challenging, but the responsibility I feel to care for the graves also brings a deep connection. I trim the grass and pick up the vases when they fall. After I started putting poetry up on the church marquee outside, poetry recommendations began slipping under our door. I hang them dutifully. The Girl Scouts have come to expect hot chocolate. I’m never too busy to engage with a mourner about their loved one.

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Since buying our house, I’ve stopped thinking so much about what my boyfriend and I don’t share. Stewarding other people’s stories, it turns out, has strengthened ours.

A few months ago, multiple family members encouraged me to come say goodbye to my father as his death rapidly approaches. For a while, it was all I could think about: Would I regret not mending our relationship, or at least trying? “You have to go,” my boyfriend advised.

Weeks later, I sat in my father’s room in the retirement home where he will no doubt spend his remaining days. There he was, sitting on the edge of the bed, his thin, frail frame doubled over. That day, I realized I’d been struggling with the wrong question. It wasn’t about whether he deserved my absolution; it was about whether I would be the kind of person who could give it. Forgiving my father wasn’t for him, so he could die in peace. It was for me so I could live in it.

I’ve learned that cemeteries, too, aren’t really for the dead. They’re for the living. They give us a chance to remember people as we wish, maybe to wash away some of the bitterness or hurt feelings we might have felt when they were alive. Our cemetery has been like that for me. But it’s also been a reminder that all things broken and complicated deserve a home and to be loved. For the first time in my life, I’ve started believing that I do, too.