Questionnaire for Old Burying Point

By A.L. Sanchez

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1. Do you remember what it was like to be grass and nothing else? It must’ve been a long while ago, about the time when the harbor brushed against you. Now the harbor is a Mexican restaurant called Tequila. Do you remember the grass?

2. What was the first dead thing here? Was it a mosquito, or maybe a woodland animal that has now gone extinct– and only you remember that it once existed?

3. How many funerals have you seen? I imagine it’s been a few, seeing that there’s over 900 marked graves. But if you had to give a number. 

4. Did they cry? A real, genuine cry? Puritans weren’t meant to cry. The rejection of earthly feeling made one close to God. So perhaps, through the mumbling of prayer, you may have seen a child. You may have seen her yearning to reach for her father’s hand, but tenderness is an affliction, so she didn’t. Did she stare down into that six foot hole, observing her mother’s corpse? The body was wrapped only in a white sheet because there’s no coffins in 1640. Did you watch the child’s lip tremble as her red eyes gave her away? Did your wind brush against her back, telling her it was okay to cry? Tell me the funerals you have seen.

5. There’s a pair of siblings here. Do you hold them tightly? One – only six months old – was more accustomed to his mother’s womb than anything else. Is the weight of dirt a comfort to him? Three year-old Deliverance was buried by his side. Their joint headstone marks their spot. Do you hold her? Did their mother visit when no one was watching? What did she say to her children? Did she, deep down, stop believing in God; because, in her religion people are born good or evil. Children only die when they’re born evil, that’s how it goes. She didn’t believe her babies were evil, did she?  Did she remember her daughter’s babble and the way her baby looked when he was asleep, like he was an extension of her very being? Did she think about when her daughter would say “lellow” instead of “yellow”? Did the mother try to recall her daughter’s voice the first time she said “I love you,” though she didn’t know what it meant, only how it felt?

6. Did she wish she had died too? 

7. Did she contemplate maybe one day, drowning herself in the harbor? But soon decided against it, because she no longer knew if heaven was real or not. 

8. Sometimes people tell me we’re born differently now. They say that before the video camera was invented, we were unfeeling creatures. I don’t want to believe it. Do you believe it? 

9. I don’t think Philip loved his wife. Really, I don’t think he loved women at all. Do you think so? In the barely formed colony, did he look at the ocean and feel trapped? Did he feel confined in his body that wasn’t quite “correct”? They say that people born here spend their entire lives yearning. When all one has to look at is the ocean, it leaves this unchecked curiosity for what lay beyond it. Did he die wishing he had been something else? Is he restless within you?

10. There’s a man here with you. He kidnapped women from Caribbean islands and enslaved them in his home. He beat them into submission. He became a judge and sent twenty people to be hanged from a willow tree. On the stand, he called upon an accused four year old girl until she wet herself and confessed to her mother’s imaginary crime. He lived to be an old man. Now he exists beneath the weight of your dirt. Do you hold him too? How equal are we in death? Do we become children again? What was he like as a child? 

11. The young author. The one who was born on the Fourth of July and never felt quite right within himself. He used to walk through when no one else was around. Why did he do that? Was it because he despised his last name? Was it because of the weight he, too, felt from carrying the name of the man who sent twenty people to the gallows? Is that why he’s not buried with you? Is that why he ended up repulsed by your soil? 

12. Do you resent the people who take pictures with you? Wide smiles and gift shop shirts over their chest– do you hate them? Would you still hold them if, right now, their hearts stopped beating and they collapsed on your dirt. Would you caress them with wind though they laugh at ghost stories and see nothing but names on your stones?

13. Do you find that there’s more death or life here? I want to say death. Yet, at times when I close the gate for the night and it is just you and me, it doesn’t feel that way. I sit down for a moment, just to see if I can hear you. And then, there’s a bird, sometimes a dragonfly. It lands on the headstone to my left. Curiously, when I put my hand out to it, it doesn’t fly away. Is that you? Is that like your caress in the wind?

14. Animals aren’t afraid here. I see so many rabbits. Life seems to flourish where death is. Can you tell me why that is? Is it because you speak in a language only animals and berries can hear?

15. Are you the great voice of the beyond? Or are you something more present and intimate? 

16. Are you life in its entirety? I’m unsure. 

17. Are we born again? Is it possible that I have been here before as another person? Sometimes I feel like I have been many people, and that one day I will be many more. Have you held me before and I’ve forgotten? 

18. Have I passed my mother or son on the street? Why have we forgotten each other? Why do people forget that we’ve met before and that we’ll meet again and again– over and over and over?

19. Do you remember me?