Whistling Past the {Graveyard}

I bounced around various daycares when I was a kid. My first nanny was Gladys, a rough-talking woman recommended by my mom’s co-worker. Gladys didn’t last long, though. One morning she called and said she couldn’t watch me anymore because her son had killed someone and gotten locked up.

After that, I went to a daycare called Toddlers and Tots, but we stopped when my parents discovered the teachers put my brother and the other infants in wooden cages for nap time.

In the summers we attended a latchkey program at a Methodist church.

There, we’d sing a particularly violent nursery rhyme called “Bunny Foo-Foo,” the plot of which describes this asshole rabbit who’s constantly scooping up field mice and bopping them on the head. A fairy comes down and scolds Bunny Foo-Foo, telling him if he doesn’t stop bullying the field mice, she’ll turn him into a goon.

To paraphrase, Bunny Foo-Foo says “fuck your rules,” and keeps roughing up the field mice, so the fairy makes good on her promise and turns him into a goon. “The moral of the story is,” the story ends, “hare today, goon tomorrow.”

The church didn’t have a playground, so during outside time, the teachers let us run free in the adjacent cemetery, playing freeze tag and Red Rover among the tombstones.

Even then, I was old enough to know something about this wasn’t quite right.

There were people down there, corpses buried just below our feet.

As such, I saw it my duty to share this info with the younger kids.

“You’re standing on a dead person, you know,” I’d say to a 4 year-old crouching behind a headstone. “Somebody’s down there and you’re stepping on them.”

After the toddler examined the soles of his shoes for corpse remnants, he’d fire the ultimate kid comeback. “Nuh-uh!”

“Yuh huh!” I’d reply. Then I’d read him the name of the person he was standing on and the date they’d died, and he’d run off crying.

I made a lot of friends in that program. I don’t think the teachers liked me much.

—

Of course I didn’t really know what I was talking about.

Aside from a few John Wayne movies, the concept of death was very abstract to me, as I think it usually is for a child who’s just learned to add and subtract.

My parents kept me pretty well insulated from death.

In hindsight they had friends and relatives who passed away—some from natural causes; others not—but they didn’t dress me in itchy polyester shirts and drag me to funerals. To me, death was something that happened to other people, like a car accident or your football team winning the Super Bowl.

This was a belief I more or less carried into my 20s, literally laughing in the face of death. I knew people who died, like the guy I went to high school with who got drunk and thought it would be funny to slide down the garbage chute of his dormitory. They didn’t find him until several days later, in the local landfill. I re-told the story endlessly for the shock value, but I didn’t feel any more attached to him than I did watching a 60 Minutes piece on Serbian genocide.

At my high school’s 10 year reunion, my friend Scott and I stood at the open bar and cracked jokes about a classmate who’d died of a brain aneurysm just after we graduated.

“I notice Pat McCarthy isn’t here,” Scott said. “Guess he’s too good for us, huh?”

—

Not long after, I was working a Sunday shift as the sales manager of a Guitar Center in Northern Virginia when I noticed one of my employees was late. It wasn’t a surprise; few 19 year-olds jump out of bed on Sunday morning at the promise of making eight bucks an hour.

His mom answered the phone when I called to yell at him.

“He’s gone,” she said blankly.

“Gone?” I asked, my annoyance rising. “Gone where?”

“Passed. Last night.”

She told me he’d gotten a flat tire on his way home from a gig, and as he was on the shoulder of the road changing it, a car doing 90 hit him head-on. He didn’t have a chance.

Here I was, sitting in my office, ready to lay into this kid about being 20 minutes late for his bullshit job, and he was dead.

I felt like a monster.

Later that week, I drove to Southeast D.C. and attended his funeral by myself. I gave my co-workers some party line about going to represent the company, but the truth is I went because I knew I’d never forgive myself if I didn’t.

What’s crazy is that sitting here almost 15 years later, I can’t even remember his name. But I remember the cold that surged through my body that day, the waxy, unnatural texture of his skin, the look of emptiness on his mother’s face.

No funeral was the same for me after that.

—

As an English teacher, part of my job is to show students how literature can be a mirror of life, reflecting back the beautiful and the ugly. Since basically every classic ends with an epic death scene, the topic of mortality eventually comes up.

“I hate to be the one to break it to you,” I say to my doe-eyed freshmen, “but one day, you’re going to die.”

I like freaking them out a little bit, getting them to look up from TikTok just long enough to momentarily ponder the great beyond. A student once visited me the day after I dropped this mortal bombshell on his class. “I’m not gonna lie man,” he said,“you really freaked me out yesterday.”

But it’s nothing more than a parlor trick, a ghost story to break up the monotony of commas and iambic pentameter. If I was being honest with them, I’d say I’m no more prepared to face the end than anyone else. I’m just a kid trampling among the tombstones of those who came before, inspecting his shoes for signs of his own demise. Hare today, goon tomorrow.