Laid flowers on six graves this summer. Beloved, departed, father, grandparents, aunts. So many. Three cemeteries, two cities. Faces everywhere, benevolent, sad in their own death. They stare from elaborate headstones. My eyes full with the sight of marbled well-tended graves, overflowing with expensive bouquets and blood red candles. Each family more anxious than the other, because to show devotion in afterlife surely matters to their poor beloved dead. With puffed out chests they carry these trophies for those who wait, a competition it is. Look at that grave, how loved he she must be. So well tended, they must visit often.
And look at that one. Poor thing. Not a soul that cares. Maybe they are all dead together.
No one to bring them bouquets and candles in that case. Plastic flowers are the best they say. They last almost forever. One doesn’t have to worry about them. Nobody wants to run to the piazza early Sunday morning for fresh ones. Especially in winter. And the candles are important too. There is a system to this. Not a game you know. Everything must be placed so and so and don’t you dare step on the dead, walk around that mound, are you crazy?!
Everyone knows Sundays are for visiting the dead. Daughters, mothers, sisters… nieces dressed in their best black. You have to look proper, it’s a sign of respect, they say. Who visits the dead in jeans, any-day shirt?
“No, listen here, you must look tastefully heartbroken. But in black please.”
As if they can see. This brigade of those long dead. As if they cared. They would rather be outside their damp resting places. Not their choice. I imagine what lies underneath and it’s not good. The pictures in my head are all ugly and it hurts in the bones to think like that. It all is just too much, but I can’t stop. It’s a madness of sorts really. Visiting graves does something to you for sure.
I would much rather be sipping cappuccino and smoking a slim cigarette at that café by the murky river of my hometown. My head is heavy now from the scent of all these flowers, cloying… and the dying smoke from the candles. Then there is the simple wooden cross, where one sister in her torment has planted violets for another and tends the grave as if it was a godamn English garden. I watch a boy weep… punch the rain-soaked earth under which his friend newly dies. A young mother wails from over there.
Curled like an earthworm over a small grave, broken in two, she waits. It’s pretty. The tomb. Angels and cherubs and a fountain. Heaven on earth they say. A father. Gone under a ceiling of leaves. On his tombstone, words of courage. His last.
Giant chestnuts and poplars stoically bear witness to many farewells and a sea of tears. Sentries. Below their gnarled branches, heavy with age and knowledge, they guard thousands of gone souls.
How heavy a burden they carry. Decades have passed and here they are. Still. Rooted to their spot with nowhere to go. Day after day, procession after procession we dump our dead at their feet. Thankfully, the day is waning. Slowly, everyone walks home, heads and shoulders bent and shriveled, aged a hundred years or more. They leave their beloved alone for a while. Until next Sunday, they say.
On Sunday they will do it all over again.
Zvezdana Rashkovich is an American writer and author born in ex-Yugoslavia and raised in the Sudan. Her work has appeared in New World Writing, Inkapture and Huffington Post among others.
Her short story and a poem have been anthologized in When Women Waken Anthologies. Zvezdana currently lives in Dubai where she is working on a novel ‘Africa in the Way I Dance.’
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