Secrets to the Grave
Under a dripping canopy of tall oaks, I stumbled around a New Jersey cemetery scanning names engraved on headstones. I knew my father was there somewhere, but exactly where was a mystery. No one from the cemetery had returned my calls, the office was deserted, and there wasn’t a soul in sight to ask. There was nothing to do but start at one end and amble up and down the walkways that snaked through the graves.
I wandered for more than an hour, wrestling with the wind to keep a grip on my umbrella, until there wasn’t much cemetery left to search. I stepped off the path here and there into the soggy grass to check the flat grave markers. It was still morning, but the sky was turning dark. I grew uneasy about being the lone mourner in this dusky graveyard.
I considered giving up, telling myself this was a fool’s errand, when a small tree branch shattered over a tombstone a few feet ahead. The sound stopped me in my tracks. Worse, it appeared to raise the dead. A large figure dressed in black rose from behind the huge granite slab. I gasped. I saw my fear register on his face, and, just as quickly, my relief. He’s not a zombie! In a minute we were both laughing at the absurdity of the situation.
“I didn’t mean to scare you,” he said, wiping mud from his knees and brushing bits of pulverized tree branch from his hair. He’d been tending to flowers at the base of what I assumed was his wife’s headstone.
“They’re lovely,” I said. “I’m sure she appreciates them.”
As the words came out of my mouth, I wondered why I’d said them. It’s not as if I believed she was gazing down from heaven to admire his offering. But he looked pleased and proud, so I knew he believed it. He thanked me, and I resumed my quest. Almost immediately I heard a splash behind me. I wheeled around in time to spy my fellow mourner shaking the last drops from a venti-sized coffee cup over the grave. He caught me looking and shrugged sheepishly. “She loved Starbucks, so I always bring her some.”
Love and grief make you do funny things, I thought.
But I suppose him bringing coffee to his dead wife was no more peculiar than me wandering a cemetery in a strange city to find the resting place of a father I’d never met, a man who died twenty years ago. He likely never even knew I existed.
He was one of many secrets my mother took to her grave. My dad, brother, and I were secrets too. She left us when I was an infant and never looked back. I didn’t hear of her again until I was well into middle age. I stumbled on her obituary and discovered she’d had six more children who never knew she’d left behind a husband and two kids. Over time, out tumbled the skeletons in her cupboard. Most shockingly, through DNA testing, I discovered the dad who raised me wasn’t my biological father. After nearly two years of sleuthing, I identified the man whose genes I carry.
I’d driven four hours to his hometown to meet his cousins—my cousins—and find a way to make sense of the loss I felt. When reached out to them, I steeled myself for rejection. But from our first phone conversation, they made me feel as if I’d always been part of their family. They sent family photos, including a portrait of my father, in whose eyes I saw myself. It stirred and thrilled me, but not like Narcissus gazing at his reflection. I saw a face so utterly familiar and knew its owner was a part of every cell in my body.
I’d checked into a motel the night before I was to meet my cousins. I drove to the cemetery in the morning, the dense fog giving way to rain just as I arrived. I don’t know what I expected to find or feel. I didn’t know how to grieve so nebulous a loss or express the unfathomable love I felt for the man who gave me life. A proverb says, grief shared is grief halved, but no ceremonies exist to acknowledge long-dead, unknown fathers; no Hallmark cards offer empathy and support. What could they say? And who would understand it’s possible to love and miss someone you don’t even know? I wasn’t sure I understood it myself.
If it hadn’t been for the coffee tribute, I might not have found my father’s grave. Distracted by the branch falling and the brief ensuing conversation, I’d walked past it. But when I pivoted to see what caused the splash, I spied my father’s name on the tombstone across the path. As I approached it, I thought about the man grieving his wife. He had rituals, however odd they might be, to honor her and mourn. I was envious. I wished I could plant flowers at the base of my father’s headstone. I wish I knew what favorite drink I might pour over his grave. Was he a light beer or single malt whiskey neat kind of guy? Had he been deeply religious? Perhaps he’d appreciate a prayer, but I didn’t know any.
Before I learned that this man, a Sicilian and Catholic, had been my father, I believed I was half Jewish. Raised without religious training by atheistic Jews, I nonetheless admired the Jewish custom of leaving a stone on the grave of a loved one. I scouted in the dirt and wet leaves for something that might serve as a temporary testament. I wanted tangible evidence that I’d commemorated my father, that I’d been present.
My selection was distinctive: oddly shaped and yellowish with veins of silver. I rubbed it like a worry stone between my fingers as I stood over the grave and thought about the man beneath. I wondered (or was I asking him?) if he loved my mother and if she loved him, if he knew about me, if he would have wanted to be my father.
I set the rock on top of the monument and said a silent goodbye.
I returned to the motel to gather my small overnight bag and notebook. As I picked them up from the luggage stand, something tumbled to the floor. I crouched down, swept the rug under the rack with my fingers, and retrieved a stone that appeared similar, if not identical, to the one I’d chosen only minutes ago at the cemetery. Along with it was a penny minted in 1998, the year of death engraved on my father’s tombstone.
My spine tingled, and for a moment I was frozen. “Don’t be a fool,” I could almost hear my father say. Not the father in the graveyard, but my living father. The dad I’d grown up with was a inveterate skeptic who raised me not to believe in that which I can’t see. We’d always been on the same page as far as that goes. But now love and grief were making me believe in funny things. I couldn’t fathom how a rock and penny might materialize out of nowhere in a clean motel room. I never carry pennies, and a rock couldn't have just fallen from the sky.
When the goosebumps subsided, I unzipped my purse, tossed in the rock and the penny, and set out to meet my cousins. Two had grown up with my father along with three of their adult daughters.
I was still rattled as I reached my cousin’s door and more than a little nervous to meet these new relatives. Within seconds, I felt as if I’d known them forever. They were straight out of My Big Fat Greek Wedding—only Italian—warm, funny, loud, and boisterous. Over salad and Sicilian pizza, they teased one another mercilessly (their currency of affection). I fell for them in an instant, grateful for the chance to forge a connection. However, I couldn't help but also feel a deep, gnawing regret that I hadn’t been raised among them. How different might my life have been if they’d always been my family?
After hours of talking and laughing, one of my cousins turned reflective. “If your father had known about you, I’m sure he would have acknowledged you,” she said, looking at me searchingly, as if she were seeing him in me.
“You might think I’m crazy,” I said, “But I think he just did.” I recounted the incident in the cemetery, proffering the rock and penny as if it were show-and-tell. In unison their eyebrows arched and jaws went slack. If anyone thought I was crazy, no one said so. Instead, they nodded knowingly, as if to say, “Of course it was him.”
Once home, I examined the photo of the rock I’d left on the tombstone. It looked just like the one I held in my hand. Again, my spine tingled. The rock and the penny would become the centerpiece of my private ritual. I tucked them into the hidden compartment of a heart-shaped, wooden box that sits next to my father’s photo. I’ll honor him by choosing to believe, if not wholeheartedly in a message from the grave, at least in my cousin’s certainty that had he known about me, he’d have accepted me. But I have to admit (don’t tell my dad!), some part of me believes it all.
-B.K. Jackson
B.K. Jackson is a journalist, editor, and founder of Severance (www.severancemag.com), an online magazine for individuals affected by DNA surprises and family secrets. Find her on Twitter @jaxbkjax.