whatever is written there, it doesn’t matter: that’s not my real name. the only person who knows my real name is my (now) only living relative–little don. my first cousin, though no longer little and well into his 90s. though i remember the day he was born: it was december, 1930. our mothers were sisters, you see, but my mother was older than his by about ten years, so by the time don rolled in there, there were four of us–cousins, that is–to help care for him. and we did. in shifts. he was a fussy baby, but he was so cute. and smiley. and gassy! and that’s when he first gave me my name: baba. it started with don, then to his mother, then to our mother, and before you knew it, the name had settled. 

no one remembers that here, in the graveyard, esp. once night settles in. it’s okay. it’s not their fault, really: memory is lost to us in life. i’m one of the new guards, but i myself have been dead for over a decade now (cancer: boring but effective), a fact I only know as the difference between the date on my stone and those of the new ones. we do not otherwise bother with keeping count. 

my mother is here, so is my auntie, and all my brothers and sisters and cousins and aunts and uncles. we all sit about and try to piece together the thing we were. but we cannot and stumble daily, nightly through the gravestones, bumping into them, shrieking at the new markers which seem to erupt from the earth overnight and without warning. we smile at one another, the last of our fleeting recognition in one another, but the memory that struggles in life struggles twice as long in death.

i can see where the living get their idea for ghosts. we are prone to wailing and shrieking and fits of rage. life in the graveyard is like living in the memorycare ward without any nurses. the dead, the forgetting, the forgotten wail for all the confusion and aimlessness they thought they had died to escape. we thought life was suffering, and death was the sweet reprieve. but instead it carries on past the point of no return.

it’s hard to say what becomes of the oldest ghosts. i see markers for spirits much older than i. great-great-great grandparents dead almost a century before i was even born, civil war veterans, and titans of the gilded age: they are nowhere to be found. those dead long enough to know them can hardely remember my name. 

i sometimes see my aunt josephine, killed in a car crash in 1920, one of the oldest among us, slipping back behind the fence into the woods. i followed her one day to a dead tree, by a dried up creek where she waited for the sun to rise and the light to trellis through the barren tree branches, casting a patchwork of light and shadow through which she walked, arms open and wept, for sorrow, for joy, passing in and out of the light, as though in and out of the rain.

i remember from my college days the old words of lao-tz, who said of water that “of all things the most yielding can overwhelm that which is of all things not hard.” i think the aged spirits coe here to the woods, and in time, their tears dissolve them. the graveyard is too hard, the ground too inflexible, the associations and networks too vivid still. and all i can think now these days is that don is in his 90s, and he will be the last to know my real name, and when he joins us, there will be no one left, and i will sneek away and meet aunt josephine in that spot among the trees, and we will fill the creek again with tears of sorrow and of joy, and into it will be washed away.