Graveside Love

How a burial visit can melt shame and bring an awakening.

Photo by D Z on Unsplash

There’s some sage green metal signs that seem to indicate the row numbers but I walk up and down squinting at the little wooden plaques that identify who is planted below without recognising any of them.

I’ve tried a few rows and my subconscious is starting to feel hopeful he’s not here. It’s all been a terrible misunderstanding. They got it wrong when I emailed the burial site a few weeks ago to ask for their opening times. Must be a different man with the same name. What a coincidence, what a silly mistake, I can go home…

And then there it is. Weathered by rain and moss. Chiselled into the wooden board, his birth to death years sit beneath his familiar first and last names.

My body wants to carry on searching. It wants my eyes to have been seeing things. My hips are turned to head on down the row, I look at my All Stars stuck in place. I want to move but my feet know better. ‘You’ve found what you came here to find.’ The whisper echoes.

There’s a visceral thud as my heart moves to my stomach and I start to grapple for breath.

My body folds onto the floor, it doesn’t know what order to do things in. 

Do I sit? Can I touch the cracked mound which still faintly makes out the space where he was buried three years earlier? 

My cloth bag drops off my shoulder and the tears just roll into the earth as I sob his name. I’m reading and rereading it from the plaque. It’s not making sense and it’s all making sense. The slotting into place of the facts of death.

He died and so his name was provided to the person who carves names into wooden plaques to be provided to the burial ground. I wonder if that person took care as he carved each of the 14 letters. No middle name. He was proud of that fact. No man in his family has one.

I knew so many details of this man’s life, and in the same thought’s breath I realised how little I knew too.

I wonder if the person who carved the years of his life took a pause at the little dash in between, realising that only 38 years filled that gap. I wonder if that brought a tear to their eye? Or this was just another life on a plaque, a part of the job, wood work tools moving expertly across the board?

I turn 38 next year. He died four months before his 39th birthday from liver and kidney failure. He drank himself to death. Had been working on it for many years.

I hadn’t spoken to him for three years. We’d been together for 13, married for under two. I’d known him since I was six years old. 

Suffice it to say we had history, lots of it. 

We’d ridden camels together in Gozo, walked on glaciers in Iceland, toured vineyards in Australia. We’d started dating when I was 17, still finishing school with my teeth in braces. He’d celebrated my graduations from high school, university and law school. He partied with me on my 21st and my 30th. The former a much stabler time, the latter seeing him barely holding it together in the depths of his unravelling.

“Oh Mark” was tumbling out my mouth as I knelt by his grave. Like I’d just discovered his limp lifeless body. As the truth of his death took roots into my being. Like the end of that exclamation was a mix between “what have you done?” and “I can’t save you now!”

Because ‘Project Save Him’ was what I’d spent an unhealthy proportion of my 20s on. Fix him, cover for him, please him. And then I can focus on me. Then I can do what I need. Or even figure out what that is.

But it’s hard to be angry when someone’s died.

It disrupted the grieving process I was already in. I was coming to terms with the life that I lost, the time wasted, the energy poured into what transpired to be betrayal and abuse.

Death is very black and white. There’s no nuance left. No his vs her story. He’s gone. And I’m staring it in the face as the ground crunches beneath my knees and I lay a palm on the pebbles and grass that litter his plot.

I cry like I haven’t yet been able to. That particular bucket is finally too full as the reality can no longer be ignored. I want to be close to his plaque and also am acutely aware how it is not him. I think of his freckles and ginger hair and balk at the idea that his body is decomposing in layers of mud beneath my hands.

It’s too much for my body to take and I gasp for air. Part of me wants to just go back to the car. But a wiser knowing keeps me heavy to the ground.

I arrange the flowers that I’d brought. Gypsophila, like we had on our wedding day. A day when he told me ominously, “it won’t always be like this” referring to his good behaviour. A day when I was also spun gleefully around on the dance floor with genuine joy. A day when I still harboured naïve hope that things would improve. A day seven years after I’d started to log his drinking patterns.

I thought it fitting to bring these particular flowers, to remember the younger me who loved the younger him. I looked down at their white blossom and mused how pretty they made the grave look. I took a photo and wondered if I’ll ever look at it.

I keep reading that grief is so big because it matches the love you felt for what you lost.

Love has been a complicated word for me to describe what we had. In the aftermath of our relationship I’ve struggled to believe I’m worthy of love after receiving the treatment he’d bestowed on me. Would you recognise love in what he did?

It occurred to me in that moment at his grave that he didn’t know how else to show love. He was terrified and grasping at whatever tendrils of control he had left. Even though that’s not a love you’d wish on someone, it was still what he thought love was. 

I had played my part in this drawn out exchange of complex loving. I’d allowed it to go on, and I’d tried loving him back. I’d tried to edit, to keep silent, to subsequently enable. Because my heart’s capacity for love was apparently wells deeper than what would be expected in the circumstances.

Worthy of love. A statement I haven’t been able to reckon with. The basis of shame that’s eaten at my core, despite years of therapy. A shame that was being massaged like soft putty as I sat in this peaceful orchard at the side of my ex-husband’s grave. A shame that was dissolving into what felt like ash at the bottom of a fire pit.

I kept showing him love for many days, months and years beyond the point any reasonable person would have stopped. 

I’d been grappling with the question so often (unfairly) asked women in these situations, ‘why didn’t you leave?’. It occurred to me that it’s not something to be ashamed of, but to be simply in awe of that I stayed. To even be impressed by the ability to love in the face of this. Dare I say proud that I’m the type of person that stayed? Who poured love on the burning oozing wound that was his disease and trauma. 

I wouldn’t advise someone to do this. But I would say that if you have done it you have nothing to be ashamed of. People told me this in the past and I hadn’t believed them. I didn’t think that staying was an act of valour, I thought it was the hugest mistake of my life. But what I now see is that it was my life’s spiritual work. To keep loving when it’s simply not deserved, welcomed or thanked.

My partner had said to me earlier that day, “the fact that you are able to visit his grave is the very reason I’m in love with you.”

I finally got it.

I can’t overstate the profundity of this awakening. A cooling sense of viscous flooding brought my heart rate down and stilled my tears. Like the satiating feeling of a cold drink on a hot day. Like starting a good meal. Like sitting down after a long walk. Like the beginning of rest.

To love and be loved. That I can be proud of. 

A shame melting trip to plot 12b was an outcome I hadn’t planned for, but was welcomed as I used the ground to support me and looked up into the branches of the nearby silver birch. 

Sending a silent message of thanks to those who chose this peaceful burial spot. Allowing me this awakening. 

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Finding solace in sharing my grief finally, and hearing from those who are also suffering. Sending out love from my heart to yours.

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I am a Somatic Coach and through my writing attempt to capture the human experience, through our minds and bodies. If you’re interested in what Somatic Coaching is or would like to try it, find out more about it here.