Then there are the celebrities, our North American royalty, those who we never knew personally, but whose lives, in some ways, we know better than those of our friends and family and maybe even our own—and whose deaths are almost as equally memorable and meaningful. Each generation has its own “Do you remember when so-and-so died?” and “Where were you when you first heard the news?” For my parents’ generation it was the day John F. Kennedy was assassinated. For mine, you never forgot where you were when you heard that Elvis Presley was dead. I was eleven years old and trading baseball cards with Jim Siddle in the basement, the August heat and humidity making it the only cool room in the house. My mother, who kept the local radio station in the kitchen on all day, heard the news first and called down the stairs. “Ray,” she said. “Elvis is dead.”
There’s surprise, of course. How could someone as wealthy and well-known as Elvis really die? But there’s more than that. It’s not about mourning the music or the films or the good deeds left undone—after all, we still have and will continue to have all of the things that the deceased did that made them well-known to begin with. And unless we’re star-obsessed sociopaths, it’s obviously not personal sorrow we experience (or imagine we experience). What we miss is the departed’s ubiquitous presence. Their (at the risk of committing an act of linguistic ugliness of Heideggerian proportions) there-ness. If Elvis can die (Elvis, who Mojo Nixon so sagely sang of in his most well-known tune, “Elvis Is Everywhere”—i.e. in our jeans, in our fast-food, in our parents, in our entire popular culture), then, gulp, I guess we can die too. When the larger-than-life lose their lives, we intuit (as we could never purely logically surmise) that no one is larger than life, that celebrity pantheism is a false religion. Elvis has left the building, folks, and he isn’t coming back, no matter how long or hard we wolf whistle and applaud. And so we sit alone in a suddenly very quiet, very empty auditorium whistling “That’s All Right Mama” in the dark.
My next funeral I remember better, but not to my credit. A twelve-year-old cousin had died in a swimming accident, a cousin from the side of the family (he was my mother’s brother’s son) who did things like swing over the Thames River from an old tire hung from a tree before diving into the dirty water below, things I would have never been allowed to do. Worse, I would have never even imagined doing them. My uncle’s four kids (all boys) were poor—my uncle worked as a roofer only when he wasn’t on a Sudbury Champagne (Canadian Club and ginger ale) bender—and couldn’t afford to play year-round organized sports like I did, but when everyone got together a couple of times over the summer for boozy barbecues, it was them, not me, who were quicker, stronger, and better at lawn darts and touch football. I had glowing white Adidas running shoes and wore wristbands like the Golden State Warriors’ Rick Barry, so it didn’t seem right that they’d always beat me to the finish line in our makeshift running races or would leave me on the ground watching one of them tear off on their way to another touchdown.
My cousin drowned in the Thames—the tire was cut down from the tree, his surviving brothers didn’t swim in the river anymore—and like everyone else at the funeral, I shook hands with his dad and brothers and kissed my aunt on the cheek and took my turn slowly walking past the open casket. He was only a year older than me, but in his suit and with his folded hands resting on his stomach and a silent smile on his face, it seemed like more than that, it seemed like he was more mature. I wasn’t glad he was dead, but I felt as if I was finally better at something than him. Smarter, because I didn’t do stupid things like swim in the filthy Thames; superior, because I was alive and he wasn’t. “When a man takes to his bed,” Baudelaire wrote, “nearly all his friends have a secret desire to see him die; some to prove that his health is inferior to his own, others in the disinterested hope of being able to study the death agony.”
When we’re children, funeral homes are like horror movie sets the monsters forgot to visit. Whatever unease one experienced upon entering was significantly dissipated when leaving. Yes, it was hushed quiet, a barely detectable pipe organ over the unseen speakers, and there were coffins in every room, all of them surrounded by bundles of flowers and some of them even with their lids open to reveal their closed-eyed occupants. But there was something too bureaucratic, too communal about the whole affair to provide one with authentic chills and thrills. If the service wasn’t much more interesting than any other time someone at the front of the room talked and talked and talked while everyone else had to sit still and be quiet and listen, and if you happened to be stuck sitting beside your Aunt Marjorie for the entire hour or more (good for five dollars on your birthday and ten at Christmas, but bowlegged and wheezy and with shiver-inducing halitosis), how could a funeral home be anything other than what it seemed to be: somewhere you had to go to do something that had to be done?
Cemeteries, however, were something else. Bicycling over with a couple of friends on a sunny summer afternoon, the big green trees big leafy lungs, breathing in and out the warm, billowing breeze, and wherever you rode or walked the wonderfully soothing smell of freshly mowed grass, “It might,” as Shelley claimed, “make one in love with death, to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place.” But it wasn’t only bucolic charm and calm. It sounded quiet and felt slow and looked so empty (but in fact was so full) it encouraged you to shut up and slow down and empty your mind (quite an accomplishment when it comes to ordinarily ceaselessly chattering thirteen-year-old boys). Empty your mind to better take in what was all around you, underneath you, everywhere. A small city of the dead. People, couples, children, families that were alive once, just like you are now, just look: born on this day of this year, died on that day of that year, Rest in Peace, Loved Forever, Will Not Be Forgotten. And except perhaps for some of the more recent arrivals, with newer headstones not yet defaced with identity-eroding lichen and memorialized with a jar of wildflowers or a weather-battered wreath, all long forgotten.
Like most people, I fulfilled—and then some—Goethe’s summation of adolescence’s exasperating (if only to others) self-absorption: “In his youth, everybody believes that the world began to exist only when he was born, and that everything really exists only for his sake.” It’s not so much that you’re inconsiderate of other people as it is that it’s difficult to believe that they actually exist. Obviously they do, in a way—everywhere you look, there goes another one—but not in the same singular way you do. How could they? If everyone is unique, then no one is. Other planets are out there (just ask the scientists, they have ways of proving it), but they exist only in relation to you—you, the life-conferring sun. We—me—is the primal prime mover.
A cemetery is an excellent ego corrective. What I think and what I feel and what I do and what I want and WHO I AM doesn’t seem quite so unique and important when everywhere you look (and step) there are thousands of others who must also have at one time considered what they thought and felt and did and wanted and were was also extraordinarily unique and important. Life tends to move too quickly—so many things to think and feel and do and want and be—for one to notice that other people exist. Only in the infrequent instances when we love another individual as Simone Weil defined love (“Belief in the existence of other human beings as such is love”) does the solipsistic scrim we’ve constructed collapse. But in a cemetery it’s difficult to deny that life simply doesn’t give a shit about us. Actually, that’s the extent of life’s concern for us once we’re dead and have gone on to join all the other busy, self-important people underneath the ground: that we make good fertilizer for the lovely trees and the sweet-smelling grass and all the pretty flowers.
A stroll though a cemetery is the anti-selfie (“Look at me! Look at me!” “Why?” “Because it’s me!”). The next logical question a graveyard’s contemplation inspires in the moderately meditative adolescent goes even further in helping to obliterate our cherished illusion