Working at a cemetery is both wonderfully melancholy and surprisingly invigorating. Everyday chores— pruning, weeding, watering— take on new meaning when bones are literally everywhere underfoot. The ground is sacred even as the tools are mundane, and isn’t all of life exactly that: a chance to work our mundane tools on sacred grounds? The gardeners pretend to be in the rational business of plant care; they worry about drought and watering hoses, perilous tree limbs and pruning cycles. They are the sensible keepers of life in a place which exists solely because of death. The dichotomy, of course, is tenuous at best. Every plant is quietly connected to the voiceless presence over whose remains it stands and from which it sprouts, a manifesto on the grace of living written in shoot, flower, and fruit. Trees cast their soothing shade over mausoleums built on top of crypts in which dead and decor crumble in pathetic unison. Graveside azaleas bend themselves in and out of shape like evergreen parentheses; they keep a tight embrace on names and dates that are like code words in a language already forgotten. The natural burial area is a-burst with sunflowers and skullcaps, milkweed and veronica, their defiant rise powered by decomposed bodies and sunshine. Flowers growing from the dead, we can’t help notice, are just as beautiful, and perhaps even sweeter. I’m reminded of Baudelaire’s The Death of Lovers:

We shall have beds full of light perfumes, 


Divans deep as tombs, 

and on the shelves, strange flowers 

Will have bloomed for us 
under fairer skies

It’s easy to fall in love with the place, dead and all. Laurel Hill is not sad as much as quietly elegiac, its gravity punctured by the rowdy laughter of the grounds’ crew digging the next grave.

A sweet encounter: one day, I am at Laurel Hill East, the original burial ground founded in the 1830s. I’m cutting back some astilbes and Japanese anemones that have had it with this three-week long, merciless heatwave. As I’m bending over the bed, pruners in hand, I feel a tingling sensation along the back of my neck. With it comes the vague sense that I’m being observed. I turn around, tool in hand, but no one’s there. I feel unsettled, but not really scared; my fellow gardeners are a stone’s throw away and I can hear their chatter. I return to my task but I’m interrupted, again and again, by the same nagging feeling. I chug down some water— maybe it’s the heat, and I’m letting my imagination run wild. The tingling returns, demanding my attention. I try to understand what it is I am experiencing, why it feels as real as touch, or smell, except it’s another kind of sense I have no name for. I feel an excited, jubilant presence. Inside my consciousness is a boy’s voice begging me to say hello, to acknowledge him. It’s childish and pressing like a toddler’s call, but not threatening. “Behind the abelia,” it blurts out; “come say hello! Come! Come!” I put my pruners down and look around, incredulous that I’m actually obeying a voice in my head. Walking this way and that in the small section, I find an abelia shrub. Behind it is the very old grave of a very small boy. “Hello,” I say, “Hello little one.” The nagging ceases instantly, as if a thirst had been quenched and a spigot turned off. I waddle back to my anemones— stunned, grateful, unsure. The only thing I know in that moment is that my consciousness is perhaps not as tightly sealed as I’d imagined.

Another story: pruning shrubs is one of my favorite tasks. Gardening has been said to be the slowest of the performing arts, and pruning is a playful, performative intervention straddling biology and aesthetics, removing what is spent and unnecessary while shaping future growth. I am assigned to prune in one of the sections of the cemetery whenever I have some free time and I look forward to these one-on-one dates with tender anticipation. Early on, I have noticed a pair of disheveled azaleas that beg for attention. They are strewn with invasive vines and saplings, overgrown, and broody. They are not in my assigned section, so I ask for permission to tackle them anyway. A few weeks go by in which there is simply no time, but I finally get the OK. I spend an entire Friday combing through the shrubs, disentangling dead wood, new growth, old leaves and ivy. It is a whole-body project that comes with scratches and pulled hair. Working from the bottom up, from the inside out, I push, pull, cut, and coddle my way to clarity. By the time I load my little truck with debris, the pair of azaleas is graceful and in scale with the grave it flanks. Nothing out of the ordinary here, except for a phone call from the office three days later. Could we please clean up so-and-so’s plot, because the family is about to have a burial there, the first one since 1996. The cemetery rep drove by on Thursday and saw a shrubby mess. My boss gulps. Yes, we’ve actually taken care of it already. On Friday. Like magic. There are 6,000 trees and shrubs at the cemetery, and why it is these two captured my heart right on time I cannot say. All I whisper is: Dear Universe, please keep on using me.