The Path in Autumn

Last week Diva took me to Quarry Hill Nature Center. We often go there when we are down: the butterfly garden, the birds fluttering about, the water shimmering on the pond. It is a Manet painting come to life. It is like that place in my head I go to when I want to create.

We went somewhere different this time. A place I hadn’t been since I was a child, as part of a class trip, and had since forgotten that it even existed: an abandon grave yard hidden in one corner of the nature reserve. At first it didn’t look like a cemetery. It looked like an ordinary field on the side of a hill. Reading the sign at the entrance, I realized over 2,000 bodies were under our feet.

Cemeteries have never affected me that much -- all my relatives chose cremation. Their ashes were scattered in the north woods of Minnesota. Knowing they are where they wanted to be gives me solace. There was no solace here. It just unnerved me and left me shaken.

I haven’t really written or drawn in a week because of it. So many feelings were flapping in my mind like a skull full of sparrows. I wanted to say something profound but there was just too much in my head. What was each person’s story? What was the life each had led until they were dumped in this field? If I had lived a hundred years ago -- would I have been committed to the state hospital and be lying in an unmarked grave right now -- right here? Would my life have amounted to no more than that? I was overwhelmed and numb.

In the end, I just decided to say what I felt and hoped that is enough. I felt the way a soldier who fought at Gettysburg must have felt visiting the cemetery of their departed comrades. After all, these were soldiers in a war -- a war for understanding and acceptance for people like Diva and I: the mentally ill.

That war is far from over. At my feet were thousands that died in a very bad place: a place they once called an insane asylum. We don’t call it that anymore. We want too forget that we ever treated humans that way. We did. Only fifty or so of their graves are even marked. This is my Gettysburg. This is hallowed ground.

Diva looked at me and whispered, “When I die, bury me here.”

I understood, perhaps for the first time in my life, we are soldiers too. And we are only part way up the hill.

Vincent




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