29
Water droplets falling from oak leaves onto mossy concrete sidewalks. Crows calling lazily from the pines, hiding from the rain. The peculiarly musty scent of a cemetery, those strange and beautiful gardens of the dead.
I sit on my mossy gravestone at B. Warren Smith Cemetery in Jacksonville Beach, Florida, the resting place of the death and life of Summer Johnson. I think about the life I lived just miles from here, the lives of my family and friends that continued after that, swirling and rising and evolving beyond me. And I am grateful to have been a part of these lives, even from afar. Because they honored me. They did not forget. They remembered, even when it was hard. They let me outlive my body in love. They carried on, they started living new lives and writing new stories, they loved each other without thinking twice. They won for me. And they are okay. This is the single most magnificent thought my soul has ever spun: my family is okay. I didn’t even have to help all the time, either – they did just fine on their own, in their own little ways. And now it’s time for me to move on and try to find my little happy ending.
This is a required step of moving on, to return to where you began and pay homage. But it is not to look back: it is to place a kiss on your past and prepare for what comes next. My past is here, but my future is elsewhere. Would I see the rest of them on the other side of the looking glass, though? The ones who left before me? Mom, Autumn, Hank, Mam, all the rest? And as I sit there, I decide it doesn’t matter. They’re with me. They’re here. They were always here. Just like I never left Cooper…
A little boy and his young mother rush past, oblivious to the souls all around them. Most of them, at least. They are visiting the mother’s grandmother, who had moved on recently due to a bad stroke. The old woman was barely known to her granddaughter, and was even more of a ghost to the child, so neither of them are sad on this particular morning. This is a pity visit. Still, I cannot resist showing myself.
Like a pink rose in a front yard on a sunny July morning, I bloom. The child sees me leaning against my grave, young and pretty and scarred against the old and weathered and battered stone marking the spot where my bones lie for eternity. Children were the only ones who ever spotted me – by the time their bones get big, they will have long stopped noticing the magic in the world and listening to what their hearts told them. In a few years’ time, he will shake his head at the sight of me and tell himself his brain is playing tricks on him – but not quite yet. He is still untouched by this cruel world. He still believes.
He stares at me, and I stare back. I think of all I was, all I am, all I will be. I don’t care that fate struck me down in my youth – I was still able to grow up and grow into myself, just from the other side of things. Just as a child grows into a pair of adorably large ears, a girl struck down at twenty-four can be set free and go on to grow into her soul. I am eternally young and agelessly wise. The world didn’t kill me: I won. I loved and learned and then passed it all on to the next ones to come along: I won at this life, and the one after it.
The boy stops and tugs at his mother’s rain jacket.
“Mommy, who’s that?”
She pauses, turns. She thinks of her grocery list on her phone, eager to get done with this visit so she can start her day. “It’s the grave of someone who died, baby. Oh, gosh, would you look at that.”
A frown creasing her pretty features, she steps closer to read the eulogy Cooper wrote for the stone some sixty years before, closing words for an all-too-brief life on Earth. The hands that had written them were now old and frail and were attached to a failing body that was about to pass on, but she didn’t know that.
SUMMER MARTIN JOHNSON
Die in Love and Live Forever
“And most of all she loved the sea
Those golden sands beneath her feet
That water blue, that salty breeze
Now she will swim in it
Forever”
WE LOVE YOU SO MUCH, SUM
YOUNG FOREVER
“Wow,” the mom sighs, clutching her son’s hand tighter. “This poor girl’s life was so short. And she lived so long ago, too. So sad. What a waste. I wonder what happened. Probably cancer – it was still terminal back then.”
“Why is she here?”
The mom looks around, suddenly aware of the chill in the air. “Huh? She’s not here, Dominic.”
“She’s right there.”
The mom fidgets a little, really getting nervous now. “Honey, this girl died, and dead people just…go away. She’s gone.”
He chews on the inside of his mouth. “So, if people just…go away when they die, then what’s the point of us being here at all?”
Dominic’s mom shivers harder than before, her son’s questions suddenly sinking a little too deeply for her to comfortably discuss in a cemetery. “You know what, I don’t know, but let’s stop talking about this.”
He bites his lip. “Okay. But one more thing. If you think you see or feel something…does that make it real?”
She pauses. “I think that’s up to you to decide. My daddy always said that reality is what you decide it is.”
As I wait, something rushes into me, a whoosh of something riding down from the future. And suddenly I understand just why I have been sent to this cemetery today, at this specific time: I am passing the baton. Learning the lessons is one thing, but passing them on is an entirely different affair, and Cooper’s book won’t be enough. When Dominic meets the brown-haired girl in the lunch line at school in three years, she will have no idea that she is about to rearrange and dominate his life forever. He will, though. I just sank the image into his mind, and when he lays eyes on her, she will imprint on him immediately. He will read Cooper’s book and realize the sterling value of love, and they will embark on a journey for the history books – a journey that will look a lot like the one I began when I stepped up the stairs of Joe’s Crab Shack some sixty years ago. There is a reason they call it “love at first sight:” the departed have already decided your fate for you, and all you have to do is look. And now Summer and Cooper have just spurred another summer affair for the ages. We had our fun. They are next.
Dominic’s mom pulls her son down the path as he stares after me, dumbfounded, and I lock eyes with him and smile. He doesn’t understand now, but he will one day.
And so will you.
Two things happen next: I bend down and kiss my tombstone. Miles away, an old man rises from a strange dream, is touched by lightning, and writes the first chapter of a book, a boyhood promise kept, a summer of eternal love swept forward into the future. And with all the power and all the glory of a wasted and wounded and ultimately useful life down on Earth, a ghost of a girl cloaks herself in bravado and floats on.