What do we owe the dead?

Welcome to The Silent Sod

Where this started

In October 2022, I was “backstage” at Oakland Cemetery wandering the grounds, preparing to portray Orelia Key Bell, a poet and cemetery resident, for the Capturing the Spirit of Oakland tours.

Every time I walk around a cemetery I discover something new, and this time was no different. I came across a grave I’d never seen before with a poem addressed to the deceased. Here’s an excerpt:

Yet how soon we too may follow,
In the path that you have trod.
And our bodies too will molder,
Underneath the silent sod.

When I first started as a tour guide at Oakland Cemetery in early 2019, I was also in the process of becoming a fitness instructor at a gym. Being a trainer wasn’t a career path I’d anticipated, and at first, I worried a lot about accidentally violating one of the principal mandates of training: do no harm. Being at the cemetery felt much easier because what damage could I do to the residents of Oakland? They were dead.

As time went on, I grew more confident in my skills at the gym, and less assured of my innocuousness at the cemetery. Even if the dead were silent, the stories I told my tour groups shaped their legacies.

Who lives, who dies, who tells your story

I’ve never seen the musical Hamilton, which this line comes from, but I did listen to the whole soundtrack once on a road trip. I cried so much it rivaled the time I watched My Sister’s Keeper on a plane when it was the only in flight movie available.

Bawling that much in public was a scarring experience and one for which I will never forgive that airline, although I’m not confident enough in my memory to know which carrier I was flying.

Historical facts and memory may overlap, but they are not the same.

Through this Substack, I hope to explore this tension between fact and memory as well as the question below, which motivates a lot of my thinking and writing:

If the living are the bearers of memory, what do we owe the dead?

I hope you will join me on this journey.

Sowing the seeds of The Silent Sod community

While I can’t predict what will come of this endeavor, I do hope to foster an environment where we can have respectful conversations around death, memory, and meaning.

If you subscribe, you can expect to hear from me 1-2 times per week.

Have thoughts to share on this post?

Know someone who would be interested in this topic?

Until next time, here’s another grave inscription to contemplate:

Amid[s]t of Life we are in Death
Stop, reader & learn to die.

---