REJECTED: morbid curiosity magazine submission...
The pathway to madness spawned in the soul of an unaware child
Approximately 2,200 words
Submitted by Daryl “Darko” Barnett
atthesea@comcast.net
BACKGROUND
I’ve been familiar with cemeteries since watching Gramma Palmer tended the graves of our family members in Springfield, Ohio. Every Sunday after church we would visit Ferncliffe Cemetery. She kept a pair of scissors in her satchel that she would use to trim the overgrown grass back from the edges of the tombstones. It would be the most like watching both an artist putting final touches on a painting, and seeing a person in a quasi-reflective swoon chatting with the spirit of the model – or in this case the deceased, that I would ever witness in my life. It was a dance for her between what time she had left in this world and keeping connected with those who left her behind. For me though, I would never speak with dead that I had known while alive – except until Grant.
< find a picture of Gramma Palmer in a cemetery to insert >
When I was 18 years old I sold all of my possessions to finance a pilgrimage to England. My first destination in London was the grave of the visionary poet William Blake. I deny ever having been obsessed with graveyards; I am just drawn to them. I am comfortable in them. Most of my life I would just play the touristy game of pompously and poetically strolling amongst tombstones, looking for my own name on a marker or try to find someone that had been born on, or died on my birthday. < insert Cornwall cemetery pic >
The first and only time this happened was shortly after I married a young woman from Ireland. I brought her to live in Mendocino where we found buried in the Protestant hillside graveyard, her namesake – “Elizabeth Anne Barnett, native of Ireland” who had died in the late 1800’s. Not only did they share the same name, they had traveled the same geographical path in life. An emigrant woman from Ireland deposited into a northern Californian outpost. We took pictures and felt a preternatural sense of destiny; did she drown? Could she have been murdered? Or maybe she died in childbirth… Now that would have been too freaky to handle because a preacher’s son in Dublin had prophesied that my wife was going to die giving birth to her second son, a child she would actually never have. < insert Mendocino pic >
PRESENT
There is a small cemetery near the town that I live in. It is an unusual looking cemetery, poised on a low dirt hill on the outskirts – magnificently shrouded by ancient oaks and shadowy sycamores. There are no lawns, (no foliage grows here as there is a year round cover of dead leaves on the ground), no vaults or crypts, but lots and lots of people are buried there (a local historian claims that over 1100 bodies are interred yet eyeballing the grounds one would find it difficult to believe that there are more than 200 markers). The acknowledged first modern burial was that of six year old Callie Chrisman in 1861. Who knows how many other people may have been deposited there prior to her. Archaeologists some centuries from now surely will conjecture otherwise.
A person that I actually knew in high school is buried in the Alamo Cemetery; Grant Pearson. He died about ten days before his twenty-first birthday in a motorcycle accident on a local road; twenty-six years ago. After I returned from living in Ireland and I discovered that Grant had died I started to visit his gravesite. I had been to the grounds on only a few occasions during my youth; usually after dark, usually trying to get a friend to accompany me so I could further establish my identity of being spiritually austere. No one could figure out why I “liked it” there. And most visits were abrupt – “Why the hell do you like it here?” I find it peaceful I would contest. “We are all going to end up here someday, aren’t we?” The mystique became real for me; personal after Grant was buried here. I knew someone dead and they were living here now.
That my father had died when I was eleven and that he was buried in a cemetery (back in Springfield) had never impacted me until one afternoon in a vacant lot in Farnborough, England. It was the summer of 1979 and I had been walking the streets of London barefoot playing a flute like a young and wild Ian Anderson. I experienced déjà vu frequently on this trip finding myself in many situations or locations that I could recount having seen before from entries in my dream journal.
I awoke from a dream one morning after sleeping on the porch of an Anglican church in Farnborough; gravestones that were hundreds of years old scattered around the grounds. In the dream I saw myself sleeping in a field of tall grass next to a white picket fence. A large vulture flew into the dream and landed on the other side of the fence from me. It then craned its neck through the slats of the fence and started to gouge chunks of flesh from my body. In my sleep I flinched defensively from the bird’s biting beak but as I watched my body in the dream I saw that I lay motionless.
Do you know sometimes how you can awake from a dream and know exactly what it means? I’ve developed an interpretive awareness of my dream’s meanings over the years of my life, especially since this tantamount threshold dream. Well, I didn’t know in my mind exactly what this dream meant but my soul was shaken and I went through the first hours of that day feeling inundated by disturbing emotions; vulnerable to some unveiling awareness.
At noon, after I wandered the streets of Farnborough with a dire sense of impending doom “it” struck me. A surge of emotion erupted and I started to cry. I started to cry so violently that I had to hide – there was a gap in a hedge that led into a vacant lot. I leapt through it and fell to the ground, heart heaving and roared out moans of anguish. I had found the suppressed and buried pain; the source of mourning that I had never expressed for my father after he died seven years prior when I was eleven. It felt like forever but I probably only laid there crying for five or ten minutes. I had heard children in a nearby yard laughing and playing and noticed how they suddenly silenced after hearing the startled commotion I made. I didn’t notice but maybe they were looking at me while I lay there, writhing. I had never shed a tear for him before.
Grant is the first dead person I’ve sat at the grave of and have spoken to. I’m forty-seven years old now and have been visiting him regularly over the past twenty-two years. Normally I would never go out of my way to see him. I would usually wait until I was pretty depressed and really needed someone to talk to. Then after dark I would sneak into the grounds with two bottles of Guinness stout; I would sit and lean against the sycamore tree by his wood-carved marker – one bottle for me, the other I would leave for him like flowers anyone else would bring to a grave.
I got an idea for a novel last year. A story about a teenage girl fascinated about cemeteries and genealogy. She is dying from a blood disorder and the chemo she receives starts to affect her perceptions of reality. She spends all of her free time in the Alamo Cemetery researching what she can determine is a timeline of connectivity between the dozens of souls buried there. With a pertinent sense of awareness that she will soon be dead too she starts to have dreams in which Alamo’s souls visit and speak to her; describing their own demises.
To empower my own imagination I began to entertain the possibilities of communicating with these souls myself. I do use drugs. I am bipolar and take antidepressants and mood stabilizers – which with experimentation can induce trance-like and psychotic states of mind. Combined with my real life emotions and loneliness, spending endless hours in the cemetery I began to seek out others that I could talk to. And I found some.
One very late night while wandering the grounds I found a waterproof container next to an unmarked grave. There was a mobile of tin angels hanging from a young tree and there was a garden ornamental cross; but no gravestone. I opened the container and found the diary of a mother whose daughter had died at the age twenty. Through reading this woman’s letters of missing her baby I started to tune into the spirit of her daughter. She was still here. It was like her mother’s clinging to her memory of her daughter manifested a presence of the poor soul. I never believed in ghosts before, not really. Of all the time I spent in cemeteries I had never been a seeker of specters.
When I talked with Grant? I knew I was only talking out loud to myself. When I sat here next to where this young woman was buried, where the emotions of her mother’s missing her was so strongly uttered through the words in this journal I really started to feel something different. I sensed a presence.
I started to bring candles to Tara’s grave. I would light them at midnight and just sit there “with her”; trying to believe that I could be company to her. Then one dead-calm, breathless night last summer as I sat listening to Metallica’s St. Anger on my mp3 player, she moved the angels that hung from her tree. I swear to god the angel mobile started to move. Staring intently at the unmoving leaves on the branch of the tree the angels moved under (there was no breeze!), I ascertained that she was letting me know that she really was there and that she appreciated my company.
Then things started to get weird. I came to the cemetery frequently, several nights a week. The old, sassy attitude I had of being “brave among the graves” started to soften. I walked more quietly, attentively through the grounds – trying to sense if there were any others I might be able to meet. Or well, tune into? I had no pretentious sense of knowing what I was doing at all. Then I found Krista.
Her grave was adorned with curio-angels and there was a laminated montage of photos of an adorable fourteen year old girl who died in 1978. There was also a Tupperware container with her mother’s diary – last entry made eighteen months prior. My heart sank and I knelt down. I brought my hands to cover my mouth as I gasped in horror at the realization of the world’s loss of this innocent one; and how she has become forgotten.
“Krista?” I uttered. “Are you here?”
There was only silence; an abominable silence. I started to bring her candles too. And I would sit. On the eve of the anniversary of her death I brought her two candles, and I swear to god this really happened. The air had been still all day. In fact, in this part of the San Ramon Valley the wind rarely blows during the summer. I knelt and lit her candles. And a gentle gust of wind blew and spun the ribbons on an old whirligig. I now knew she knew I cared and was thankful for my company.
A new idea entered my mind. Can I ease the pain of the loneliness of this place? I started to come during the day to the cemetery to become at least generally familiar with the information of all of the tombstones, in particular seeking out the graves of the youngest dead as premature death seemed most unfair to me. And it started to occur to me that cemeteries are more places of forgetfulness, not remembrance. Bodies are left in cemeteries. Tara’s mother has visited her grave every Sunday since she died. Yet twenty-seven years later Krista’s mother didn’t even leave an entry this year.
As I tweaked my medication experimentation further, one night I made an agreement with an internet friend in Ohio to make a psychic-rendezvous in time synch with each other; me in my cemetery, her in her local cemetery. Midnight Eastern Time I had the strongest union of synchronicity with another person that I have ever experienced. And I aroused a more insane sense of connection with the souls in this place than I ever imagined a sane person could truly believe they are capable or desirous of.
I felt called upon by these dead to become their sentinel, their watcher, their friend, their remember-er. I took home the broken half of a tombstone that night to use as a touchstone that I could keep in my bedroom. It is at the head of my bed and as I touch it each night before I sleep I believe that I connect with my dead friends and assure them that they are not forgotten.
Approximately 2,200 words
Submitted by Daryl “Darko” Barnett
atthesea@comcast.net
BACKGROUND
I’ve been familiar with cemeteries since watching Gramma Palmer tended the graves of our family members in Springfield, Ohio. Every Sunday after church we would visit Ferncliffe Cemetery. She kept a pair of scissors in her satchel that she would use to trim the overgrown grass back from the edges of the tombstones. It would be the most like watching both an artist putting final touches on a painting, and seeing a person in a quasi-reflective swoon chatting with the spirit of the model – or in this case the deceased, that I would ever witness in my life. It was a dance for her between what time she had left in this world and keeping connected with those who left her behind. For me though, I would never speak with dead that I had known while alive – except until Grant.
< find a picture of Gramma Palmer in a cemetery to insert >
When I was 18 years old I sold all of my possessions to finance a pilgrimage to England. My first destination in London was the grave of the visionary poet William Blake. I deny ever having been obsessed with graveyards; I am just drawn to them. I am comfortable in them. Most of my life I would just play the touristy game of pompously and poetically strolling amongst tombstones, looking for my own name on a marker or try to find someone that had been born on, or died on my birthday. < insert Cornwall cemetery pic >
The first and only time this happened was shortly after I married a young woman from Ireland. I brought her to live in Mendocino where we found buried in the Protestant hillside graveyard, her namesake – “Elizabeth Anne Barnett, native of Ireland” who had died in the late 1800’s. Not only did they share the same name, they had traveled the same geographical path in life. An emigrant woman from Ireland deposited into a northern Californian outpost. We took pictures and felt a preternatural sense of destiny; did she drown? Could she have been murdered? Or maybe she died in childbirth… Now that would have been too freaky to handle because a preacher’s son in Dublin had prophesied that my wife was going to die giving birth to her second son, a child she would actually never have. < insert Mendocino pic >
PRESENT
There is a small cemetery near the town that I live in. It is an unusual looking cemetery, poised on a low dirt hill on the outskirts – magnificently shrouded by ancient oaks and shadowy sycamores. There are no lawns, (no foliage grows here as there is a year round cover of dead leaves on the ground), no vaults or crypts, but lots and lots of people are buried there (a local historian claims that over 1100 bodies are interred yet eyeballing the grounds one would find it difficult to believe that there are more than 200 markers). The acknowledged first modern burial was that of six year old Callie Chrisman in 1861. Who knows how many other people may have been deposited there prior to her. Archaeologists some centuries from now surely will conjecture otherwise.
A person that I actually knew in high school is buried in the Alamo Cemetery; Grant Pearson. He died about ten days before his twenty-first birthday in a motorcycle accident on a local road; twenty-six years ago. After I returned from living in Ireland and I discovered that Grant had died I started to visit his gravesite. I had been to the grounds on only a few occasions during my youth; usually after dark, usually trying to get a friend to accompany me so I could further establish my identity of being spiritually austere. No one could figure out why I “liked it” there. And most visits were abrupt – “Why the hell do you like it here?” I find it peaceful I would contest. “We are all going to end up here someday, aren’t we?” The mystique became real for me; personal after Grant was buried here. I knew someone dead and they were living here now.
That my father had died when I was eleven and that he was buried in a cemetery (back in Springfield) had never impacted me until one afternoon in a vacant lot in Farnborough, England. It was the summer of 1979 and I had been walking the streets of London barefoot playing a flute like a young and wild Ian Anderson. I experienced déjà vu frequently on this trip finding myself in many situations or locations that I could recount having seen before from entries in my dream journal.
I awoke from a dream one morning after sleeping on the porch of an Anglican church in Farnborough; gravestones that were hundreds of years old scattered around the grounds. In the dream I saw myself sleeping in a field of tall grass next to a white picket fence. A large vulture flew into the dream and landed on the other side of the fence from me. It then craned its neck through the slats of the fence and started to gouge chunks of flesh from my body. In my sleep I flinched defensively from the bird’s biting beak but as I watched my body in the dream I saw that I lay motionless.
Do you know sometimes how you can awake from a dream and know exactly what it means? I’ve developed an interpretive awareness of my dream’s meanings over the years of my life, especially since this tantamount threshold dream. Well, I didn’t know in my mind exactly what this dream meant but my soul was shaken and I went through the first hours of that day feeling inundated by disturbing emotions; vulnerable to some unveiling awareness.
At noon, after I wandered the streets of Farnborough with a dire sense of impending doom “it” struck me. A surge of emotion erupted and I started to cry. I started to cry so violently that I had to hide – there was a gap in a hedge that led into a vacant lot. I leapt through it and fell to the ground, heart heaving and roared out moans of anguish. I had found the suppressed and buried pain; the source of mourning that I had never expressed for my father after he died seven years prior when I was eleven. It felt like forever but I probably only laid there crying for five or ten minutes. I had heard children in a nearby yard laughing and playing and noticed how they suddenly silenced after hearing the startled commotion I made. I didn’t notice but maybe they were looking at me while I lay there, writhing. I had never shed a tear for him before.
Grant is the first dead person I’ve sat at the grave of and have spoken to. I’m forty-seven years old now and have been visiting him regularly over the past twenty-two years. Normally I would never go out of my way to see him. I would usually wait until I was pretty depressed and really needed someone to talk to. Then after dark I would sneak into the grounds with two bottles of Guinness stout; I would sit and lean against the sycamore tree by his wood-carved marker – one bottle for me, the other I would leave for him like flowers anyone else would bring to a grave.
I got an idea for a novel last year. A story about a teenage girl fascinated about cemeteries and genealogy. She is dying from a blood disorder and the chemo she receives starts to affect her perceptions of reality. She spends all of her free time in the Alamo Cemetery researching what she can determine is a timeline of connectivity between the dozens of souls buried there. With a pertinent sense of awareness that she will soon be dead too she starts to have dreams in which Alamo’s souls visit and speak to her; describing their own demises.
To empower my own imagination I began to entertain the possibilities of communicating with these souls myself. I do use drugs. I am bipolar and take antidepressants and mood stabilizers – which with experimentation can induce trance-like and psychotic states of mind. Combined with my real life emotions and loneliness, spending endless hours in the cemetery I began to seek out others that I could talk to. And I found some.
One very late night while wandering the grounds I found a waterproof container next to an unmarked grave. There was a mobile of tin angels hanging from a young tree and there was a garden ornamental cross; but no gravestone. I opened the container and found the diary of a mother whose daughter had died at the age twenty. Through reading this woman’s letters of missing her baby I started to tune into the spirit of her daughter. She was still here. It was like her mother’s clinging to her memory of her daughter manifested a presence of the poor soul. I never believed in ghosts before, not really. Of all the time I spent in cemeteries I had never been a seeker of specters.
When I talked with Grant? I knew I was only talking out loud to myself. When I sat here next to where this young woman was buried, where the emotions of her mother’s missing her was so strongly uttered through the words in this journal I really started to feel something different. I sensed a presence.
I started to bring candles to Tara’s grave. I would light them at midnight and just sit there “with her”; trying to believe that I could be company to her. Then one dead-calm, breathless night last summer as I sat listening to Metallica’s St. Anger on my mp3 player, she moved the angels that hung from her tree. I swear to god the angel mobile started to move. Staring intently at the unmoving leaves on the branch of the tree the angels moved under (there was no breeze!), I ascertained that she was letting me know that she really was there and that she appreciated my company.
Then things started to get weird. I came to the cemetery frequently, several nights a week. The old, sassy attitude I had of being “brave among the graves” started to soften. I walked more quietly, attentively through the grounds – trying to sense if there were any others I might be able to meet. Or well, tune into? I had no pretentious sense of knowing what I was doing at all. Then I found Krista.
Her grave was adorned with curio-angels and there was a laminated montage of photos of an adorable fourteen year old girl who died in 1978. There was also a Tupperware container with her mother’s diary – last entry made eighteen months prior. My heart sank and I knelt down. I brought my hands to cover my mouth as I gasped in horror at the realization of the world’s loss of this innocent one; and how she has become forgotten.
“Krista?” I uttered. “Are you here?”
There was only silence; an abominable silence. I started to bring her candles too. And I would sit. On the eve of the anniversary of her death I brought her two candles, and I swear to god this really happened. The air had been still all day. In fact, in this part of the San Ramon Valley the wind rarely blows during the summer. I knelt and lit her candles. And a gentle gust of wind blew and spun the ribbons on an old whirligig. I now knew she knew I cared and was thankful for my company.
A new idea entered my mind. Can I ease the pain of the loneliness of this place? I started to come during the day to the cemetery to become at least generally familiar with the information of all of the tombstones, in particular seeking out the graves of the youngest dead as premature death seemed most unfair to me. And it started to occur to me that cemeteries are more places of forgetfulness, not remembrance. Bodies are left in cemeteries. Tara’s mother has visited her grave every Sunday since she died. Yet twenty-seven years later Krista’s mother didn’t even leave an entry this year.
As I tweaked my medication experimentation further, one night I made an agreement with an internet friend in Ohio to make a psychic-rendezvous in time synch with each other; me in my cemetery, her in her local cemetery. Midnight Eastern Time I had the strongest union of synchronicity with another person that I have ever experienced. And I aroused a more insane sense of connection with the souls in this place than I ever imagined a sane person could truly believe they are capable or desirous of.
I felt called upon by these dead to become their sentinel, their watcher, their friend, their remember-er. I took home the broken half of a tombstone that night to use as a touchstone that I could keep in my bedroom. It is at the head of my bed and as I touch it each night before I sleep I believe that I connect with my dead friends and assure them that they are not forgotten.
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