By: A. J. Frantz
July 7, 2016
Generations of mummis have said that when it storms,
it’s just the ancient thunder god, Ukko, making love to his wife.
I pity Akka, his old woman, because this summer has been hot and dry; the air is dense as I run
through it, chasing distant cousins across the family graveyard.
We leap across fieldstones, slinging bubbles and silly string,
our faces round with youth and Finnish ancestry.
The field, surrounded by a warped fence, illuminates with camera flash as this
moment is captured forever on dollar store film.
An aunt runs over, sour words spilling out as she begins to scold us for disrupting
the stones that are only placemarkers for long-gone ashes. Oh, leave them be,
another chimes back. They’re having fun.
It’s what Frank and Judy would’ve wanted here.
July 28, 2023
My grandmother’s cemetery sits next to a municipal airport.
Mail planes buzz overhead as I trample through the overgrown grass, searching
for a small marble stone inlaid between the weeds.
I crane my neck across every marker I find, swaying over them in the heat.
Findagrave.com tells me the section where she rests forever
and so I scour each row until the sun dips into the horizon.
I ache, fuzzy with dehydration, and come up empty-handed
except for an article, barely visible as the evening sky glares off my phone.
A woman in the thumbnail sobs, standing in a sea of headstones
as the caption details how this cemetery exhumed and misplaced dozens of caskets. Laid to
rest in a bed of soil, they are now long gone, disturbed from the earth. In trying to find a
grave, I discover it is lost forever.
February 10, 2024
My partner and I discuss how we’d like to be buried.
As young, mostly healthy people, we don’t anticipate going anywhere soon but we
plan regardless, like we plan the names of children we’ll never have or second, third,
fourth lives we’ll never live.
We both detest the idea of being embalmed,
preserved in a box like a specimen,
bloated with formaldehyde as the world above lives on
flowing, breathing, pumping in the fresh air outside of a coffin.
Like good midwestern Lutherans, our grandparents were mostly cremated, left along
beaches and quays, indistinguishable from the sand around them. I can’t shake the
image of my body, stiff and empty,
being engulfed in flames and charred like a bad marshmallow.
We agree that when our hearts churn their last blood, brains think their last thoughts, we’d like
to be left on a forest floor to get nibbled on by passing wildlife.
It’s spuriously legal, but if a will can describe exactly how every asset be divided,
we don’t see why we can’t dictate what happens to the one thing you ever truly own.
A. J. Frantz is from Detroit, MI and currently studies urban sustainability at Oberlin College. Their work has appeared in Touchstone, The Utican, and more.