Maplewood Cemetery

2. This cemetery shouldn’t mean anything to me. No one I know is buried here. No one I love is buried here. And yet, it’s been a source of comfort for me these past two years, as inappropriate as that feels because it doesn’t deserve to be mine. During covid, my best bryden and I would go on long walks to the downtown area, and one day we walked a bit off the mall and stumbled into this place. As people accustomed to romanticizing their lives, of course we had to enter and on this beautiful sunny day, we wondered, looking at the intricate tombstones and wondering who these people were. Whenever my My dad and I are near a grave, we always talk about the people who lived to be 80 or 90 years old, and what their lives must’ve looked like. What would it have been like to live through the last good years before the depression? We always feel bad for the boys who were born in 1900, because it’s possible they would have to fight in the First World War, and if they were lucky enough to survive, would likely fight in the Second, too. As bryden and I walked around, I told her about these conversations, and we talked about the lives of the women who lived 50 years beyond their husbands. We were imagining beautiful lives of grandeur, aware that we were probably wrong about almost everything. There was also this sad french song bryden showed me in this cemetery. We sat in silence and listened. Every time I hear that song I’m taken back to that moment, that sense of life I felt amongst so much death.