Today’s Youth and the Cemetery: Two Encounters
My nephew, who is 19 years old now, grew up outside of Sacramento, living with his parents until his father, my brother, killed himself in 2015. He stayed in the house with his mother — a bad place for him — until he graduated from high school in 2019, and then left his mother’s house and moved in with me and my wife in Santa Rosa. In early 2021 he moved back to the Sacramento area, staying with the kind and generous family of a high school friend in the next town over from his hometown. I drove out to see him the other day. He’s doing well, taking classes at the community college, working part-time, exercising regularly. He looks good. His eyes are clear. He smiles a lot, and laughs freely. We had a nice visit, a walk and then lunch, and then I dropped him off so he could get to work by 2 pm. My route back to the freeway took me through the town where my brother had lived, and where he is buried, and the thought occurred to me that I should visit his grave, which I hadn’t returned to since the day of his funeral in 2015.
If it seems odd to you that the thought of visiting my brother’s grave would just occur to me as I was driving by it, I agree. It is odd. I’m hardly alone in failing to deal well or rationally with the aftermath of a loved one’s suicide.
But I didn’t remember where the cemetery was, and I don’t carry a smart phone, so as I drove into town I picked out the Visitor’s Center and stopped to ask directions. The center was a long rectangular wooden building, part of a former train station. As I approached the building I saw a couple of teenaged guys with skateboards at the far end. I passed several closed doors, but thought I heard voices at the far end, around the corner from the skateboarders, and headed that way, only to see that the voices came from three other teenagers, two male and one female, who were sitting against the wall at the building’s far end. The Visitor’s Center was closed.
I looked at the two guys with skateboards, and the three against the wall, and they looked back, sullen, guarded. They were sixteen or seventeen years old, I guess. Unreflecting, I thought, teenagers with skateboards. Stoners. I didn’t stop to wonder what they were thinking about me. I turned to the first two, and asked them, “I’m looking for the cemetery. Do you know where it is?” And their faces changed, softened, their eyes opened wide, they became unguarded. I was wearing a mask, and they weren’t, but it was as if they had taken off masks, as if I hadn’t seen them when I thought, skateboarders and stoners, and now I did see them. As if they’d seen a hand reaching towards them, and assumed that a blow was coming, only to discover that it was outstretched in need, that they were being asked for help. One asked, “Which cemetery?” Not knowing there was more than one, and recalling my brother’s graveside ceremony, I guessed, “The older one, if there is an older one.” This stumped them, so I said something polite, and made to leave, when the young woman sitting against the wall spoke up, asking me what I was looking for. Again, I said, the cemetery, and again, she asked, which one? She didn’t know where the old cemetery was, but the guy sitting next to her did, and he told me how to get there. I thanked him, and them. The guy who had directed me said, no problem. By now I had taken off my mask. I was surprised and moved by their response, by the way their faces had changed, by the fervor of their human generosity. I felt as if I wanted to help them. But I didn’t.
As I stepped away, the third kid against the wall, the only one who hadn’t spoken up, called after me. “Probably half of us will be in there,” he said, “in two years.” I looked at him. He was grinning, but not joking. I looked at the others. Their faces said they noted and understood his remark. I don’t claim to understand completely what they all did, but it was not possible to miss the gist. They stared at me, and the masks began to come back up. Here was the moment for me to soften, to drop my guard, to open my eyes, and to engage. “Two years?” I might have asked. “What’s up with that?” But I didn’t. Instead I stammered “Oh come on folks, you need to stick around longer than that.” And off I went to the cemetery.
Turned out it was the newer one. My brother’s gravestone was filthy and neglected. I felt indignant about that, so I cleaned it off, and felt better.
Since then, it has occurred to me to wonder, what sort of thing did those young people, so guarded and withdrawn before I asked for help finding the cemetery, expect me to say to them?
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The next day, back in Santa Rosa, Val and I went downtown to Juilliard Park for a rally held by Sunrise, a movement of young people committed to stopping climate change. Seven young Sunrise members, all under 25 years of age, had walked from Paradise California, which the Camp Fire burned to the ground in 2018, to Santa Rosa, where 5000 homes burned overnight in the Tubbs Fire in 2017. They would continue to walk to San Francisco, where they would rally outside of the offices of Nancy Pelosi and Dianne Feinstein, pressuring them to support funding for a Civilian Climate Corps. Each one of the young folk took the stage in the park and spoke briefly, about how catastrophic annual wildfires were a feature of their lives, about the suffering and trauma they’d witnessed, about the link between just economic policy and meaningful action on climate change. They were energetic. Their faces were open, passionate, earnest, unguarded. They smiled, laughed. Some of them raised their voices in anger. They were more or less unpolished. Together they were asking their elders in power to use that power to give them a decent future. To save them from a catastrophic future. And they knew — this came through clearly — that those elders, if they had their way, would ignore the Sunrise kids. They were trying to make the elders listen, and attend.
One of them, Vianni, told the story of her family. She was older than the others, more polished, more focused. Her grandfather left Mexico for the U.S when he was eighteen, she said, and spent his adult life as a farmworker, looking for a better life for his family than he had found in Mexico. She, his granddaughter, who grew up in San Diego, had graduated from the University of California at Santa Cruz. Her mother had worked in real estate, and as a child Vianni had helped her mother, and this experience in turn helped her land a post-college job as personal assistant to a San Diego real estate broker who specialized in luxury homes. She had worked for him through 2019–20, and even as the pandemic unfolded her boss’s profits grew, she told us, by 20%. He told her frequently that he loved her work, that he hoped she would stay with him for another ten years, until he retired. Whenever he said that, Vianni said, her heart would sink. She calculated that she was making 3% of what her boss made, helping him sell multi-million-dollar luxury homes, while she herself could never hope to save enough on her salary to buy a starter home in San Diego. So Vianni asked her boss to sit down with her, and she reviewed what an asset she was for his business, as he himself had affirmed repeatedly, and asked him for a raise. He considered what she said, and replied that the most he could do was to increase her pay by 50 cents an hour. A few weeks later he fired her.
She asked him for help. He responded as he did. I thought about this, and set myself to imagine Vianni’s conversation with her boss. In imagination, I studied his face as she spoke. Imagine it yourself. Do you see his face soften, do his eyes open wider, does he become unguarded, earnest, wanting to help? Does his face reflect the basic human instinct to help another in need — what I saw in the faces of the teenagers who wanted to help me find the cemetery?
I told this story to my son, who is a few years older than Vianni. Of the 50 cents an hour raise offer, he said, “Well that was fuck you.” I could hardly disagree. Her boss thought he was saying, “Isn’t it wonderful that I am your benevolent patron and mentor in this best of all possible worlds?” But what Vianni heard was something closer — and now I’m channeling the kids by the Visitor’s Center — to “Fuck off and die.” And this seemed, for me, to distill the experience of the Sunrise youth. They were working to get the attention of their powerful elders, to ask them, in effect, “Don’t kill us.” In return, their elders offer them 50 cents an hour, saying — whether or not they think they’re saying it — you’re disposable. I will dispose of your decent future, and even your livable future, to protect my comfortable present.
“You can die, for all I care.” That, I think now, was the sort of thing those other kids hanging out by the Visitor’s Center were expecting me to say.
