The day after our final child—our oldest son—moved out last November, we went on a short road trip to IKEA and a cemetery. I hoped to replace an accidentally broken glass canister but then I spotted a green floral William-Morris-like coverlet and I remembered something I’d read that flipped the idea of the empty nest, suggesting when the kids did move out, it was an opportunity for refeathering the nest. So the bedspread came to the checkout with us.
I wanted to visit the cemetery because one of my ancestors was buried there. My mother had long said that when I reached A Certain Age, I too would develop an interest in genealogy. It turned out she was both right and wrong. In me—a novelist—the interest has turned quite specific and it has turned to this ancestor who died prematurely exactly a hundred years ago, and his father whose profound grief shaped generations of my family. I read Carl Jung who said his work was to do the work left undone by his ancestors. That is how it feels as I write a novel based on their lives.
In the book I’m writing, I play with the facts but not with the truth. But the day after our own oldest son moved out, I wanted to visit this cemetery.
Three days post-partum with that son, as my milk came in, I cried and said a line I would later bequeath to a character in another novel: someday he’s going to grow up and leave us. At the very start, that grief, that homesickness, was baked in. It took more than a quarter-century for the day to come—an unseasonably warm November day with thin sunlight and strong winds—but it had come.,
Those strong winds found us on the top of a hilly cemetery, with a harbor visible on one side of us and a bay on the other. I knew the bay well: when I was a child, my family was evacuated to this city after a dangerous train derailment in our own city, the largest peacetime evacuation in North America before Hurricane Katrina. The anxiety of this evacuation was compounded by the fact that my mother was fully pregnant with my brother, and that a few years before, my healthy sister had been stillborn after complications during delivery. We walked that bay the November we were evacuated, while my mother made regular visits to the hospital to check in. My brother would be safely delivered a day or two after we returned home.
My mother had once visited this grave with her father. She recalled a gravestone of a small lamb and lettering worn down over the years. The Internet told us the section of the cemetery in which he was buried. And so under the strong winds and thin sunlight, my husband and I searched every lamb, looking for the one that had gone astray. We looked again, including parting branches of a bush that had grown around one such grave. I realized I wasn’t leaving until we found it. My husband fortunately broadened his search to grave markers that weren’t lambs, calling me over when he found the grave: a marble cube with an open book on top, and the words beloved son inscribed below his name. My husband slipped away, then, to the car, allowing me time alone. I took pictures and took in the facts of the grave, the location and the views, but it wasn’t like visiting the grave of someone I’ve loved, and my book and my work isn’t about the son but the father. In my book, the son is a kind of cipher. As I’ve written it the story of Abraham and the near-sacrifice of Isaac keeps coming to mind. Because how does a parent let his beloved son go into the will of God? Because it is not a lamb provided instead when Abraham’s hand is stayed, but a ram.
So my son going off into the world, having forgotten to be vaccinated against diseases endemic to the place he would be visiting, not polio but other diseases that shouldn’t but could end up with a grave marker and a grieving parent.
There’s an old proverb that a parent gives a child two things: roots and wings. I read that before I had kids and I believed it to be deeply true. I still believe it. I believe we have given that to our own kids. I also believe it’s what I was instinctively reaching for myself that windy day: the pilgrimage to the cemetery and the visit to IKEA. The walking and bending and feeling the wind provided a knowing in my body of where my people came from and were rooted, and the trip to IKEA, the refeathering the nest, was not as frivolous as it might seem. It was the wings. It was the ram in the thicket. It was the looking forward with hope to a future beyond one where children lived at home, to one where flowers climbed across our bed at night and perhaps even into our dreams of new life blossoming in November.