What happens when you drive past a cemetery every day on your way to school?
Columns of rain pound into the pavement. School buses skid around the corner and wheeze into the street. Palm trees sway. Towers glimmer.
Across the lobby, families congregate to watch the downpour. Kids and parents in curry-stained pajamas press their noses against the rain-glazed doors (“Mo-ooo-m, look!”). Even people who have never spoken before — have drifted and flitted past each other like flies, absent, unseeing — press together today, a theatre of bewitched spectators.
A snarl and a snort rise above the rain now. I peer past the crowd in the lobby and behold, through the sliding doors, a lurching vehicle. Out of the lobby I go, through the mud-caked road, and onto the bus. Down the center, past the other kids and there, a seat at the back — mine.
My bus rides to school are mostly identical. Every morning and afternoon, that sweet-sour bus, and its quirky cast of characters. Like the third grader with big, beaming eyes and a raspy voice, the kind of low, delicate voice you’d hear in songs or quasi-whispering on the radio. Or the duo of fifth graders — all buzz cuts and flashy glasses — who, five minutes into a ride (any ride) will have a fresh feud declared, troops mobilized, verbal slingshots loaded and launched. Or like the eighth grader. Reticent. Reserved. An economy of expression so extreme, I would be astounded if I didn’t also completely understand; peer closely and you can glean glimpses of my younger self in her, flickers and flashes of a faded past.
And every morning, it’s the same route, too — a kind of uniformity that, over time, coalesces into a single mass of memories. Every morning, off we’ll go past gleaming towers, past glowing mosques, past morning joggers bobbing and bouncing like lanterns along lush, dew-licked carpets of green — this one scene on repeat, every day, like a replaying reel, a meditative melody, until there, at last, on the final stretch to school, the cemetery. The cemetery in its glaring, gloomy garb.
The first time I laid eyes on this cemetery — eons ago, some indistinguishable school day in my hazy wad of memories — I was overwhelmed by the newness. A sunburnt skin of sand, bare and boundless. Slabs of stone standing upright, spines straight. Graves pressed and packed together. Graves robed in a wilting white. Graves winding and weaving into the distance till the headstones, already miniature dominos, shrink and shrivel into spindly sticks. But after that first day, the newness wore off, and something else remained. A kind of strange aftertaste: somber but also sinful, profound with a pinch of the profane.
Every morning, the bus ride to school unspools like a song; there is a soothing sameness to each ride, a cleansing quality that cocoons me. Outside my window, the city blooms afresh. The streets regenerate after a night’s sullen slumber. And then, there — a cemetery. My morning optimism implodes. My sappiness unhooks itself like a bird from a branch and takes flight. The jarring juxtaposition — sunny, summery self zipping past bleak backdrop — blindsides me, blows me apart and away. It’s like a shrill ‘Morning Mortality Alert’: I will be doing my thing, people-watching outside my bus window, extracting another butter cookie from my lunch bag, and then the bus rolls down the bridge, the cemetery rears its head, and the pressing, punishing knowledge, both vague and omnipresent, plows into my awareness — the knowledge that this raw churning of the heart and mind, this untouched feeling is finite.
In the economy of existence, I want equilibrium. I want to learn how to live a life laced with light and loss.
Every morning, I wrestle with this knowledge. And every morning, I think: In the long shadow of finality, doesn’t so much feel futile? Ambition tastes shallow. Beauty feels brittle. The future contracts and compresses before my eyes like an accordion, shrivels like dried dates. And I’m inundated with questions, lots of questions. Questions that manifest less as a coherent sequence of words than a meandering monosyllabic stream: purpose — belief — LIFE!—meaning — faith — service — afterlife! But then the stream slows, and the words settle — and again, that ancient question: will I be ready for that out there? Will I be ready for that final bedding of bodies, the culmination of a life’s chronicle? What does ‘readiness’ even look like? A noble resignation, or a kind of rabid enthusiasm: Gosh, heartiest thanks to you, dearest Death, for sapping the breath from my body? If I snag on these thoughts long enough, a kind of anarchic angst swells inside me: I feel the compulsion, the impulse to set things straight, to sort my Life out, to settle it all now, right now, a kind of Marie-Kondo approach to tidying the mess of meaning. If I could, I think to myself, I would excise the confusion from my being with surgical accuracy. I would extract it with a scalpel and label it on a petri dish. Here: ‘Apprehension’. Here: ‘Quest for Meaning’. And here (with an elaborate flourish of the surgeon’s gloved hand): ‘Existential Anxiety’.
One morning, zooming past the cemetery, prodded again by these piercing, prying questions, I wondered: is there a better embodiment of this dilemma than your good old baking show? The chummy contestants blend and beat and bake, pouring batter into bowls, sliding cakes into ovens. How wonderful is life! How delightful! How grateful are we for — and then they look up and see the timer. The batter has no flour. The cakes refuse to rise in the oven.
How do you wear this constraint with composure? How do you reconcile the sensation of infinity with the fact of finitude? How do you go about your days aware that your earthly existence will elapse, but also relish and revel in the seemingly mundane: Hey, ugh, gotta change that profile picture; Hey, this doughnut? And that custard filling? Yowza; and WOW. Gosh. That sky. How do you, in short, ‘beat the clock’ like those bakers — ward off that strained, scurrying impulse, master instead a kind of composed urgency? Of course, it may be that this is all a technical dilemma, rooted in questions of age and lifespan. But as intriguing as the alternative—immortality — is, I have often wondered if it is satisfying.
The feeling I’m after, I think, is not to lengthen life, but widen it — not to make it longer, but larger somehow. In the economy of existence, I want equilibrium; I want to milk meaning from every sleeve and sliver of time. I want to cradle life’s contradictions, coax them out of contention and into a peaceful, propulsive coexistence, learn how to live a life laced with light and loss. And though my rationale may be crudely calculative, even maximalist, my instinct is not: I want, simply, to make peace with the fact that we are lightning bolts in the sprawling span of the universe — bright but brief, flashing furiously then fusing and fizzling out.
The feeling I’m after is not to lengthen life, but widen it — not to make it longer, but larger somehow.
Another morning, another bus ride. The sky is still a faint purple. Ahead of me, in row 3, a fiery feud is currently underway with Third Grader 1 and Third Grader 2 actively debating the historical origins of the Bubble Gum Under Seat 6. Suddenly, I look out my window. I see the cemetery. I say a little prayer, and it feels transcendental. It feels like telepathy. It feels, strangely, like I’m talking to a Summit of Sleeping Souls. This is always a revelation to me, the knowledge that those who are gone are still within reach. This is never not news — the sense that fatality is not final, that it is not a realm beyond recall. That there is a place, beyond the binaries of life and death, where life is merely preface and prologue, prelude and preparation, and (death) is not a bookend, but a beginning.
And now — my mind zooms, whizzing and whirling, pedaling backwards until the bus scribbles out of the school parking lot, the rain-rimmed school gates wheeze to a close, the reel outside my window reverses, rewinds, reverts, and we are zipping past the cemetery, again.
Life is merely preface and prologue, and fatality is not final.
Ten seconds, that cemetery. It takes ten seconds to cross the cemetery but three for the vague glints and glimmers in my mind to fuse into an image: a sunburnt skin of sand, dense with dominos; a vast yard, enclosed in white walls; and a raindrop — scarce, sacred — plunging into the parched earth where, upon impact, there is revival and renewal, there is blooming and birth.
Out of the ground, a ball of bark breaks through, swelling and surging through the skin of the earth. All along the bark’s body, big, burly branches shoot out and arc upwards, sprouting like skyscrapers. Twisted twigs like sinewy arms pop their heads out. Lush leaves burst through — not the dull green of olives, but a bright green, the green of limes, vivid and vibrant. Like umbrellas, the leaves shoot out and snap open in one swift, spritely go, and when the seasons cycle on, leaves all over the world pry themselves loose and peel away, flicking themselves onto the ground like drops of paint, swiveling and spiraling downwards. But not these leaves. No matter the season, these leaves — they’re there. Processions come and go, buses roar past, day yields to night, dark to light, and the leaves live on. They hang from the tree, unfurling their green glory, fanning out like fingers, showering their snug shade over the tombstones that share their soil and the stories stored in the stones and the souls dwelling in them, asleep.
