WHISTLING PAST THE GRAVEYARD
Next morning, after the hotel breakfast buffet, I put on my Sunday best (which looked an awful lot like my Monday race day wear), consisting of cargo pants, Ironman top and Boston Marathon 2005 windbreaker, and headed back to the subway. Green line to Park, Red line to Harvard Square. A friendly good luck from one of the riders as we stepped off into the gloom beneath Cambridge. “How’d she know I was running tomorrow?” I asked myself, as I re-adjusted my Boston Marathon 2006 grey hat to better cover my forehead from any stray rays of the sun I might encounter on the #71 I would take to Mount Auburn Cemetery.
During the late 60s, when I was at college at Wesleyan University in Middletown CT, my girlfriend (a year behind me in high school), ended up at Radcliffe. I would spend weekends visiting her, and we’d travel all over Cambridge and the greater Boston area, meandering around and sightseeing, being basically penniless in an innocuous way. She was very smart, of course (the average ‘Cliffie was a valedictorian or salutatorian of her class, with a combined SAT score of 1460), but she always thought that my mother’s recommendation helped her get in. My mom had a PhD in psychology, and had started her academics in that field with a Master’s from Radcliffe after the war when my parents lived in Lynn, Mass.
The bus dropped me off right in front of the entrance. I wanted to buy some flowers, roses actually, to put on the grave, but saw no florist anywhere around. Odd, this being such a big cemetery and all. Just inside, there was a small stone kiosk with several maps. I had the area and plot of Susie’s grave, and discovered that my destination was literally at the other end of the park. I popped on my headphones and fired up my iPod.
When I first learned Susie had died, 20 years ago at age 35 of leukemia, we still listened to vinyl. I rummaged through my record collection looking for something to console me. In the mid sixties, she would summer with her family at Martha’s Vineyard, and talked about hearing James Taylor play at the Community Center in Menemsha. So we got into his music when he hit it big a few years later. I instantly went to “Fire and Rain”: “Suzanne, the plans they made put an end to you … I always thought that I’d see you, one more time again.” But of course, I never did. I’d gone West, she’d stayed East after college. We’d been too much in love to stay friends, so all my memories of her are of our perfect times together; we didn’t have any life everafter, so my tears on learning of her passing were pure adolescence rushing back at me.
Sometime about a month before I left for Boston, I got the idea that I needed to clarify once and for all when her birthday was. Knowing I was going back to Boston must have triggered it. I knew it was in May, either the 5th or the 25th. Deep down, I guess I knew she was a Gemini, but for some reason, I did a small amount of detective work trying to discover her death certificate on the internet. All I got was a Boston Globe obituary, which contained several intriguing facts: her funeral was on May 30th, she was buried in Mt. Auburn Cemetery, and she was survived by her immediate family (all of whom I knew, of course), and her “fiance”, a psychiatrist named Harry. She was identified as a psychologist, training in psychoanalysis. Odd. My Mother was a clinical psychologist, and my father’s name was Harry.
I looked up Mt. Auburn Cemetery, and found it was in Cambridge, easily accessible by public transportation. I resolved to make a pilgrimage to her grave site, and maybe find a little closure, or at least spend some time wallowing in maudlin memories. Music always helps me do that.
Another song which seemed somehow fitting, as I planned to visit her on the day before my final marathon, was “Dead Flowers”, by the Rolling Stones. It’s actually a creepy little thing, both biting and sorrowful. Maybe I never forgave her for not following me on my life, instead of living her own, I don’t know. In it, Mick is singing to “little Susie”, and he promises, “I won’t forget to put roses on your grave.” It appears on “Sticky Fingers.” I called up “Dead Flowers”, assuming I’d flip to “Fire and Rain” as soon as it was done.
Mt. Auburn Cemetery got its start in 1831, with a new idea for graveyards. Boston is an old town, for America. In the midst of the city there are several 17th and 18th century burial plots. If you look at the gravestones, you’ll see the earlier ones have skull and crossbones carved on them. On later headstones, that image is transformed into a rather gruesome looking angel (imagine a Jolly Roger with wings). The purveyors of Mt. Auburn thought that the dead should rest in a park where people would want to come and visit, and be uplifted by a garden atmosphere. They went in for flowering trees, ponds, gardens, willows and the like. It’s a quiet, hilly little place, ripe for contemplation and remembrance.
But it was BUSTLING on this Sunday morning. I couldn’t figure it why my walk toward the back kept being interrupted by carloads of mourners, until I remembered, “It’s Easter!” Yes, the perfect day to look for one who’s died, hoping against hope that she might come back into my life (especially if she’s Jewish.) As I meandered slowly to area 9250, plot 62, I got lost in the music, the warmth of the mid-April sun, and the endless stream of old men and women chauferred by their middle aged children on to someone’s grave. The iPod Shuffle took over, and I never got to Jamie Taylor.
“Sticky Fingers” has a lot of bluesy, soft and sad songs in it. The Shuffle gods brought me, in quick succession, “Dead Flowers”, “Wild Horses”, “Moonlight Mile”, and, yes, “I Got the Blues”. I actually got lost in a Mick Taylor guitar solo on that last one. By the time I re-surfaced, I was nearing the flower shop, which was conveniently located about 100 yards from where Susie was said to be resting. Yes, the lady had some red roses, and I also got two yellow ones for good measure. I clutched them, and strode off to try and find her gravestone.
I circled for several minutes, spiraling closer until, with a sudden shock, I saw the slab, set flush to the ground like all the others after the mid-sixties. “Susan Jane Wise. May 25 1949. May 28 1984” The dates, one atop the other, were flanked on each side by what appeared to be pumpkins. I’m sure there’s a good story there, but it’s not one I was ever a part of.
I don’t know what I expected, I had a sudden feeling of finality, of reality. A letter from her mother, telling me of her death (only after my mother had written, asking about it), an obituary, with small details, the announcement in our high school alumni magazine of a memorial fund – all of these were oddly vacuous, able to be brushed aside. A gravestone, with its weight, its intention to tell the infinite future of this death, is permanent, static, unchanging, immobile. I moved my iPod to my Funeral/Wake playlist.
Yes, it’s true, I have a set of songs I want played at MY funeral. Why not? I’d like to enjoy it while I’m still alive if I can. So Bono started singing “Bad”, a song he created for a friend’s death, about the same time Susie died. This is my favorite U2 cut, a live version from 1989. “Let it go/Surrender/Dislocate/See you walk away/into the light/Set your spirit free/see you breakaway/into the night/thru the day/into the half light/through the flame – Let it go, and so fade away.”