A week or so ago I posted about my sister Karole Sessums being here for a visit in San Francisco and then the first week of May posted about each of our parents on their birthdays. They both died within a year of each other - my father when he was 32 and my mother when she was 33. My sister, brother and I grew up going to the cemetery every weekend with our grandparents, who raised us, to keep up our parents graves and used that field of stones as our childhood playground. Even now when I return to that cemetery - death and loss a kind of playground that has followed me throughout my life as a gay man now of a certain age - I feel like that child who wanted to play but knew that I was playing where they lay beneath the ground in their caskets, death as much my parent as my parents themselves had ever been in some way I am still trying to fathom. Once my brother and I - in a long talk one night about our childhoods - eerily admitted that we each harbored a fantasy of digging them up and opening their caskets to see what they looked like down there. I know that sounds creepy but it didnt feel creepy as kids who spent every Saturday pulling weeds from around their tombstones and wiping bird shit from atop them before playing chase or hide-and-seek or just walking around and reading other tombstones - especially the really old ones - and making up stories about the lives of the dead people I did not know and those they left behind. Narrative early on was a way I found to comfort myself from the pain of being myself. It distanced me from death. Narrative - a kind of living entity that always lives - denied it. Each story I made up was just a version of my own. My own is just a version of each one I made up. Karole, who is also a singer and songwriter, captures some of all this in this haunting song she wrote about our childhoods spent visiting our dead parents on Saturday afternoons and, little by little, letting go of holding on ...
Posted on: Fri, 23 May 2014 22:09:17 +0000
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