Running Through the Boneyard

The city cemetery lies just behind my office, hidden by a stand of trees. I get to it by walking out behind the garden to a path that takes me to the edge of the grave nearest to our fence. I run there. It's quiet and beautiful. I read the names, dates, and acknowledgments on the markers as I pass them. Beloved wife. Our Little Angel. Dear Father. It is sometimes a shock to remember that I will die. It's easy to forget that in the bustle of day-to-day life. I know how tenuous the thread is. I've seen how quickly it can end. I can't remember a day when I haven't acknowledged what a gift my life is. But I think about my own death most of the time in terms of might. I might die today. I might die next week. I might die when I'm old. I rarely think about it in terms of will. I rarely think about it when I'm running alongside hundreds of graves. It most often hits me at night, just before I'm about to sleep. I am going to die. My brain will stop working one day and I will die. Inevitably, the thought will be accompanied by that feeling of falling in bed, that feeling that makes you jump and shudder for a split second, even after you realize that you are not falling after all.

A friend told me once that it is a sign of enlightenment not to fear your own death. I think of it as having a baby. When I was pregnant for the first time, near my due date, I freaked out. I was alone, trying to figure out how I was going to still maintain a busy law practice and care for an infant. I'd been so busy with all the doctor's appointments and logistics of shifting my life around that I hadn't really stopped to think about the physical process of having a child. So I freaked out. I was scared shitless of what was going to happen. Was it going to hurt? What if I couldn't do it? How was I going to get through it? But then I told myself that I was one of millions and millions of women who had gone through the very same experience since the beginning of time. It made me feel not so alone anymore. It calmed me to think that I wasn't the first one, nor would I be the last. That I had no way to know where the strand I was a part of began or where it would end gave me a sense of the infinite and it made me peaceful and quietly brave.

This is why I like running through the boneyard. It gives me that same sense of how simultaneously small and large my own life is. It is what I remember when I have that twinge of fear late at night about ceasing to be who I am, about losing what I have become. I remember the movement of it, the continuity. It helps me to understand my place. It helps me to understand that I am one small seed pearl on an infinite string of human beings, begun and ultimately ended by the common experiences of birth and death.