A Graveyard's New Meaning

Kristen Heinan -- I drive to work and back the same way every day. It’s usually the fastest way; it’s the most direct way; and there’s really no reason to go any other way. So, for months now I have been driving this route, and for months I have been driving by a grave yard -- passing it on my right as I drive up the hill on the way to work, and on my left as I coast downhill on my way home. And normally, I don’t give it a second thought (unlike when I was in third grade and my friend convinced me that we needed to hold our breath when passing a graveyard -- in deference to all the dead people who couldn’t breathe).

But one morning last week was different. That morning, there was a dingy pick-up truck parked on the graveyard hill, with buckets and tarps and tools in the back. And, there were two flannel-shirted, blue-jeaned men with mud-encrusted boots working beside it. Digging a new grave. My heart sank a little as I thought about the family that would be mourning the loss of their loved one, and my stomach felt a little queasy as I noticed that the truck was parked on other graves while this new one was being dug.

And then, I felt like rocks were dumped into the pit of my churning stomach, as the thought crossed my mind, “that could be Bella’s grave” (not her real name). I tried to shake the thought out of my head -- who wants to think about a child dying? Children do not belong in the ground! It was a horrible, horrible thought, a horrible revelation there in my car, passing by the graveyard, on the way to work. I wanted to throw up.

Bella is a sweet and wonderful little girl I had met a couple of weeks before. She had been in the hospital just overnight, long enough to get some transfusions and some palliative treatments so that she would be feeling as good as possible for her Make-A-Wish trip. She is in the end stages of cancer. I had heard recently that she had gone into hospice care since she returned from that Make-A-Wish trip.

During med school, when I was volunteering with a hospice agency, I would have been pleased to hear that a terminal patient had chosen hospice care. But that was with adults, and mostly with elderly adults. Sure, it was sad, but it was also often a relief when they died -- they were freed from the pain, worry, and suffering brought by their illnesses. And sure it was sad for their families, but the families were freed from the pain, worry, and suffering of watching their loved ones be afflicted by their diseases. Right? And old people are supposed to die, eventually; it’s the natural progression of things. Right? But there’s just something so unnatural about little kids dying. I don’t like the thought of putting anyone’s body in the ground (or storing it anywhere else, for that matter), but the thought of burying little kids is just wrong.

I don’t know if Bella has died (yet) or not, but those were the thoughts that went through my head that morning. And since then, I haven’t been able to drive obliviously past the graveyard.