Skeletons by Elisa Nickerson

I have driven by St Mary’s Cemetery many times before. It has sat, grey and rather unremarkable, out my side window throughout the thousands of drives through New London in my life. Today I drove in for the very first time. I had a general idea of where to go based on a primitive map emailed to me by a kind man I had spoken to on the phone when I asked about plot numbers and names. I pulled in and drove down to the left. I parked in the circular driveway in front of a tall structure with engraved names up and down the exterior. Perhaps this building held urns, the dust and particles of the cremated all placed behind the plaques and plastic flowers that adorned them.

I walked toward the larger part of the cemetery where the headstones and monuments were and looked for section D, turning my phone different ways to try and follow the map I had pulled up on the screen. I walked up one side, looking at the names on the headstones and I saw it. I felt my stomach drop and heard an audible gasp at the sight of my grandparents grave. My grandparents whom I had never met. I touched the top of the headstone and traced their etched names with my finger. There was a small stone figure of a little girl holding a bowl sitting at the base and I couldn’t tell if she were affixed or placed there afterward.

I sat down on the grass - I thought about them being directly underneath me.
There they were, these people who I had imagined but never known. Their bones lying there in whatever outfits were chosen for them to be buried in. Maybe she was wearing a dress her daughters knew was her favorite - perhaps she had a brooch clipped to her lapel that was now tarnished from being in the ground so long. He was a WWII Veteran so I imagine his bones were covered in his Marine uniform with medals and patches. These bones that held them up when they were alive - that wrote, walked, danced, buckled and cracked, covered with skin, tissue, blood, muscle and guts.

But not now.

Now I am sitting on the earth above what is left of them. I was a ghost in their lives. Something they wanted to erase or forget but, I imagine, haunted them none the less.
I spoke to them out loud...
”Here I am! I found you! I am your great disappointment, what you pushed away with shame from the family. I am here and you can’t hide from me”.
I felt the hot tears come as I asked the questions that lived in me always. The questions I never could have asked if they were alive...

“Why didn’t you help her? Why couldn’t you lead with love? How could you have let her give me away? “ You were so afraid of me, and here I am, covered in your flesh - the grandchild not mentioned in your obituaries.

I am sitting on top of your buried bones, haunting you with the truth. I can feel the warm sun on my face.
I am real, alive.
I am not a ghost rattling chains of fear, howling spite into my coffin.

I am not the ghost now. You are.