Subject Matter

Event One: It was quarter to eight; the big yellow bus was always late. Standing at the edge of the driveway the boys would begin pairing off, Christy and I were the only girls, and stood in silence. The boys on the block had cooties - we would sit together. Five minutes past eight the loud bus came barreling down the street and stopped 50 feet beyond where we were standing. Christy and I made a dash hoping to get a seat in the back of the bus. Our neighborhood was just over a mile from school but we had to drive by “the spot”. The bus turned right onto Forest Road and the edge of the graveyard entered into our view at the top of the hill in the distance. It grew closer, and as the bus reached the top of the hill and turned onto North Main Street, Christy and I began to hold our breath. The bus took an eternity to pass the seemingly endless rows of headstones and markers; Christy and I just sat in silence and watched them pass by.

Event Two: October 6, 2007: My brother, mom and I drove up North Main Street and parked. Both sides of the street were lined with cars; my heart began to pound and my eyes filled with water. A serpentine human river of black twisted beyond the reach of the eye - from the entrance all the way down to a lower yard where a memorial was set up. We were handed a program, with Hil’s unmistakable smile gracing the cover; I opened the card to see that I was one of the first speakers, and my heart began to ache.

Looking Back: Holding our breath while we passed the graveyard became a game that everyone on the bus would play. Your luck would supposedly change if you couldn’t hold your breath for the entire time. As a child I looked at death as a mysterious thing. While it is a natural part of life I never grasped what it meant to lose someone. It was just something that happened to other people and its permanence was never understood. The stone heads were all that was left to represent a person who once lived. As the bus drove past the graves they were just numbers not individuals to me. It takes a deeper understanding, and, perhaps more importantly, a visceral experience to process graves as memorials, testaments to the memory of an individual’s influence on others and the world that succeed him or her. Losing a friend brought life to each and every stone that whizzed past the window of the school bus. In understanding the impermanency of life I began to question how I would be remembered and how my actions affect others? Life is full of preciousness, beauty, and potential but simultaneously it contains loss, ugliness, and pain my work attempts to bridge the gap between these aspects of human life.