Grocery store flowers

Claire Doll
MSMU Class of 2024

(1/2023) I’ve always loved cemeteries.

There’s a cemetery that’s particularly beautiful and holds a very special place in my heart. It’s located on the outskirts of Baltimore City, and as soon as you drive through the big iron gates, you have no choice but to follow the gravel road. It spirals up and down hills, and in the springtime, the chartreuse grass contrasts the bright, blue sky that stretches for miles. There’s always flowers dotted next to the many gravestones, but they’re never real—they’re instead from grocery stores, from at-home gardens, from anywhere but the actual earth of the cemetery. And I think that’s beautiful: a hand-picked collage of carnations and roses and baby’s breath, coloring the world even in its darkest places.

My grandmother would often take my sister and me to the cemetery on drives. Margaret and I were young, only in elementary school, but I always associated the graveyard next to Mommom’s neighborhood with beautiful spring days and lunches at Shannon’s. It was the cemetery where my extended family was buried, the cemetery that belonged to our church, the cemetery that went on and on forever, where you could just get lost in it. Even as a child, I associated cemeteries with peacefulness, with color and springtime.

When you’re young, you think the world exists just for you. It’s a naVve experience, a veil of innocence that slowly tears and chips away with each jolting milestone. When you’re young, you come up with explanations and ideas that make sense, only in your mind. And when you’re young, you create your own meaning. The thing about life, however, is that it slowly develops and unravels, and suddenly, you find that cemeteries are not just there for beauty and grace, but rather for deeper, darker reasons.

The first death I ever experienced was that of a baby—my cousin, eleven weeks old. The weight of my sadness was inexplainable; not only did I not understand the gravity of the situation, but I also felt the shock of a new meaning take over, filling my body. He was a baby, hadn’t even lived two full months of his life, and he had passed. When you’re young, maybe seven or eight years old, you simply can’t process such a thing. You start to question life and make your own meaning and sense of things, even when reality says otherwise.

He’s still here, I would tell myself. Just napping, just sleeping. Out of an inexplainable shock, I had somehow convinced myself that because my cousin was a baby, his death was temporary. That he would come back.

Death is not irreversible, however, and that’s the point of cemeteries. To remember. To fill the world with grocery store carnations so that we can acknowledge the souls that have passed. This truth is meant to be learned over time, after years of experience and wisdom gained from adulthood.

Maybe my thoughts of my cousin’s death could be considered "childlike" and "innocent." Perhaps when I expressed these thoughts to my parents and other family members, they might have brushed them off. That’s cute. That’s good that she doesn’t understand this. Children aren’t meant to experience death this young, like this.

But when is it right to tell children the truth about death? About these moments in life that are completely unexpected, that no one ever tells you about, until it happens, and you find yourself crying yourself to sleep and making new meanings of things? When do we figure out the right meanings to life? Are we meant to do this ourselves?

When my cousin’s grave was put into the Baltimore cemetery I loved so much, it all became real. The very place I associated with peacefulness and springtime had grown to the new meaning of death and permanence and winter. Of silent tears and drab, gray skies that hung over you like a weight. When my mother had explained to me that my cousin wasn’t coming back, had explained to me what a "funeral" was, I felt new meanings emerge. She had told me I was wrong in my beliefs, and suddenly, a large piece of my naivety had fallen away. I couldn’t seem to get it back, although I reached for it. The veil of innocence was not chipped away; it had been shattered.

I would argue that there’s never a right time to tell the truth to children about these kinds of experiences. The thing about life is that it is constantly moving, constantly changing its route and course and speed, and if we don’t accept this, then we will arrive at these experiences unexpectedly, unprepared.

Children have growing, expanding minds—not stagnant, nor unchanging. When we see things like beautiful cemeteries with flourishing, colorful flowers, we are inviting ourselves to understand why those flowers exist. Why they are bought from grocery stores. Why people kneel at graves for hours until the sky grows pink. Why the smallest-size grave is given to my baby cousin.

And maybe, there’s a certain beauty in unveiling these meanings. To tell kids, simply, that they’re wrong in their beliefs. To help children to understand and grow from even the darkest life experiences is to allow them a deeper, clearer insight into the world. Innocence is beautiful but temporary—and although life is dark and filled with difficult truths, we can discover a truer beauty beneath all of this.

Flash forward to sixteen. I’m learning how to drive, and my mother takes me to the spirally backroads of our favorite cemetery to perfect my right- and left-hand turns. It’s an April day, and the entire world is chilled and stirring in peace. You can tell that spring is trying its very hardest to emerge, but the trees surrounding are still barren, stretching their limbs into the oil-painted sky. If you look closely, there are buds growing. And I’m sixteen. Full of truths and understandings of the world, but still new to many things. Like learning how to drive.

Humans constantly cling to their innocence because, to us, being exposed to some parts of life is terrifying. But I would say that innocence is the opportunity to be suspended in between meanings that we create for ourselves, and meanings of the world. For children to grow and flourish fully, they must be guided through their childhood with an upmost respect for the truth.

Read other articles by Claire Doll