The Dirt that Holds Us--Blog Entry #7

Sunday, March 24, 2013

1:30pm

37˚F

"Its arrogance will break your heart"

As I sit under this long white sky, I ask myself what I’m really doing here. Why do I come to this cemetery? Is it because I want to know about dying? Is it because I wonder what these bodies all around me already know? Do they know? Can they tell me where my soul will leave my body or if it will? Can they tell me who will protect my body after death? Can they tell me anything I don’t already know? Maybe when it happens, when we are severed from this life, our souls forget we ever lived. Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad. Would it be fair for us to die and then continue to die knowing what we have lost? Some say it is worse for the ones left behind. The families that have to deal with the sky every morning, knowing its blue will rise over a world missing of someone.

Something is new here today. There are no deer anywhere in sight, but all around me there are freshly buried bodies. I have never seen this before—bodies so vulnerable. The only thing separating them from the world, from me, is the dirt. For the first time, I don’t feel welcome here. I feel like I’m invading on this space. That this is something I shouldn’t see. Before this moment, I could forget the bodies were under this ground because they were hidden. There were no mounds of dirt rising out of the earth to remind me. There were only gravestones that acted as shields as if they were symbols of the bodies and that the actual bodies didn't exist. But now I know they are here and I feel like I'm exploiting them. I’m looking at these bodies in their most fragile states and they have no knowledge of my eyes. They have no way of breaking my stare. They have no names. They are alone with only the dirt separating them.

"Two weeks ago / we had to coax it / into taking her body"

At this moment, I begin to realize the importance of the dirt. The way it is able to cover the bodies with its burnt orange body without breaking—a dirt body made up of thousands of individual pieces of body. How much we need the dirt in death. How much we need it to tell our love ones that yes we are gone, that yes this dirt is proof. How the dirt is able to merge with the dead as if it were an extension of them, as if it were the dead. I wonder if the dirt knows that its dry and cracked skin is and will always be the body’s last blanket. If it knows that its role in this space is to protect the body at its most vulnerable state. If it knows how the body uses it to prove it’s leaving, to be guided into the earth. If it knows how much we need it to hold us in the end.   

There is an unusual cold today. Not an uncomfortable cold or a cold you cannot bear. But the kind of cold that shocks you into life, that forces you to see because you will focus on anything to distract yourself from it. I miss the deer in this kind of cold and wonder if they are not here because of what they’ve seen. I wonder if they too felt they were exploiting the bodies and left. I cannot help but wonder if the dirt has become numb to its job.  

"Today, / after a light rain, / I see it hasn’t bothered / to conceal its seams." 

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The Dirt that Holds Us--Blog Entry #7 Inspired By:

“Dirt”

By Jo McDougall

Its arrogance will break your heart.

Two weeks ago

we had to coax it

into taking her body.

Today,

after a light rain,

I see it hasn’t bothered

to conceal its seams.