Prologue: Life at Daniel's Place

Weeks after the governor shut down North Carolina due to the coronavirus pandemic, I put on a pair of tennis shoes. It was a Sunday in April, yet my church held no services. Since I couldn't go there to worship, I drove across town to Markham Memorial Gardens. People feared the virus, but fear was nowhere on the rolling lawn dotted with grave markers and tall Carolina pines. The dead can't get Covid. And I can't get the illness from them. As I drove, I smiled at my dark humor.

But my humor evaporated once I faced the white wooden fence at the entrance. My eyes blurred with tears. The tears, which I'm a fanatic about labeling, were not tears of sorrow, hurt, or pain. They were those special tears cried when we know someone has cared for, looked after, and loved us, even when we didn't realize what was happening. My spirit had come to this place for safety, but not from Covid or our country's looming troubles. Long before news of the virus and the shutdown, this corner of the world had become my secure haven and respite.

As I walked the circular driveway, passing the familiar gravestones and landmarks, flashbacks played through my mind. Here, I had once wanted to die, before my healing had begun.

Four years into my grief, I was invited to facilitate a writing workshop. Sascha, a poet and bereaved mother who had lost both her children— the youngest to drowning and the oldest to suicide—asked me to fill in for her at a conference in Denver, Colorado. She was ill and needed a substitute. I was instructed to share how beneficial writing from heartache is. As I stood at the podium before forty bereaved parents, I knew writing helped me. But did others find it therapeutic? I introduced some writing prompts and was pleased when parents stood to read their poetry in memory of their son or daughter.

After I made it through the workshop—where I hoped no one had noticed my insecurity from being a novice—one of the event volunteers approached me. I thought she was trying to make me feel good when she said, "Alice, there was a lot of healing going on in that room." I had no idea what a room of healing looked like.

Decades later, I know. I know how a grassy landscape of remorse becomes a sanctuary of discovery and gratitude. I know how God takes our most profound agony and replaces it with his joy. I know how pouring pain onto paper transforms pent- up anguish into hope. I have experienced how a mother lacking confidence dared to seek fulfillment. This did not happen over weeks; it took years.

The cemetery welcomed me that Sunday in April. True, the dead were still silent; they could no longer share their opinion, ponder, or rush to be anywhere. For them, what was done was done; it was over. As for me, I still had a course to run— peace to absorb, ideas to wrestle with, lessons to invite, and healing to embrace. Gratitude for the quiet landscape rich with my history filled me; I started to sing. I belted out one of my favorite hymns, repeating the first verse six times because that was the only verse I knew from heart. “Our God, our help in ages past, our hope for years to come, our shelter from the stormy blast, and our eternal home.”

And that is another pleasure of being at the cemetery: the dead don’t complain.

Read it all! Get the memoir here!