Medusa Cemetery

A car pulls into the cemetery in Medusa, New York. Three people are inside the vehicle: two women—one younger, one middle-aged—and an old man wearing a hat. The middle-aged woman is driving, the old man sits on the passenger side, the younger woman rides in the back seat. The car comes to a stop not far from where I stand. Not knowing what else to do, I wave to the people in the car. Only the old man waves back. He has a mild look of surprise on his face. Maybe he hasn’t waved to anybody in a while. The women get out of the car, looking like they mean business. They are wearing designer scrubs. With an unrefined but practiced maneuver, they pry the old man out of the car. The hat stays on his head. The women try to steady him. The old man just stares astonished at the ground.

I am watching all this. The middle-aged woman sees what I’m up to. She puts on a professional smile, the one used for family members when they show up at the nursing home. “He’s ninety years old,” she says to me. “We’ve brought him here from Connecticut to see his wife. Right over there.” She points to a marker next to where I stand. Inscribed upon it are a couple of names—his and hers. I nod, then move off to another side of the cemetery so the old man can have some privacy. Every once in a while I take a look back. I can see the old man with his hat and the two attendants in designer scrubs standing over a particular plot among all the other plots.

After an interval, the visiting party turns away from the gravesite. Very, very slowly the old man moves toward the car, the attendants closely following. Then, in a motion slower still, the old man appears to waver. He begins to fall. From the far side of the cemetery, I watch in horror. The old man is falling, falling, down, down, down. At last his knees come to rest upon the green, receiving earth. He looks as if he’s praying. No apparent damage. The women grab hold of him before he can fall any further. They hoist him back up with the same unrefined but practiced maneuver they used before. That’s when his cries begin to fall like falling leaves all across the cemetery: “Oh! Oh! Oh!” The car they arrived in is nearby. “Oh! Oh! Oh!” The women pack him into it. “Oh! Oh! Oh!” The engine starts and they drive away, out through the cemetery gate. Last thing I see of the old man is his hat—through the back window of the car.

I cross the cemetery once more and return to the plot where it all began. A pair of indentations in the soft grass—monuments to a moment accidentally observed—mark where the old man’s knees met the ground.

©John P. O’Grady

Originally appeared in The Mountain Eagle on August 17, 2018