Buried
by Jane Edberg
An excerpt from the illustrated memoir, The Fine Art of Grieving, to be published by Linen Press Books in March 2024
Trying to get back to your old self is like trying to bring someone back from the dead.
An urgency, like a siren wailing from inside, alerted me to make more room for an expanding self. Some friends and family members expected me to return to my old-self, the self they knew before my nineteen year old son, Nanda died, but I couldn’t return to an old-self when there was no old-self to return to. My new-self had survived grief-drowning. I was born when I embraced death. I decided to honor the old-self by putting it to rest. Time to dig a hole.
Earth, I needed earth. A container large enough to hold who I was, not to bury the past, but to relinquish a self that had perished, to let earth carry the burden. I envisioned the burial centered in a tree circle, like the redwoods surrounding the birthing room where I pushed Nanda out in one squeeze. The trees waved as the nurse slid him onto my chest. Although a tree circle is technically a ring of new generation trees born from the roots of the dead parent tree, I would be birthed from the roots of Nanda.
I drove six hours to my friend, Faith’s property in Gualala, a forested parcel of land which happened to be a tree circle heaven. Nanda, as a child, made many a pilgrimage there to spent wild time in the woods with her kids.
Faith’s living space occupied the second floor of her A-frame cabin above her art studio. I hauled my bags and camera gear up the stairs. We sat on her balcony overlooking a grass-filled meadow edged with giant redwoods. Misted in fog we drank amber ales, munched chips and salsa, and chatted about art and family tribulations for hours. When the sky darkened, she handed me a flashlight, snubbed out a clove cigarette we had shared, tipped her head back and released smoke as she spoke.
“You’re gonna love this. Follow me.”
Flashlight in hand, I rummaged through bags to collect the camera and blanket. We flicker-walked through the forest to a young tree circle. Tree bodies surrounded a ring of stones, a fire pit. She lit a mound of twigs which soon blazed; then she hefted a log onto the fire. Embers snapped and cracked, scattered and fizzled on the damp ground. A chill ran down my back, but my face and legs were heat-soaked to the bone. I looked into Faith’s eyes, the color of the ocean in her oil paintings, cerulean blue. She had tears, tears I couldn’t muster. She had cried for me the night Nanda died when I was all cried out, and at his memorial service when I felt numb, and whenever I spoke of him she was a waterworks as I held back grief.
I attached the camera to a tripod next to the fire pit and readied the timer. I joined Faith to face the lens. Gold light from flames bounced across us. A fiery chunk of branch cracked and popped; tiny sparks spiraled and vanished into the night sky. Wearing Nanda’s blanket like a cape, she stood behind me, and like a winged woman she drew the blanket around us, rested her arms over my shoulders, clasped her hands at my chest and nuzzled her face next to mine. I pressed the remote shutter release to hold that moment. It felt like the three of us standing there.
The next morning, after a homecooked breakfast, milk and sugared grasshopper-spit-colored coffee, and a ciggy, Faith, looking like a modern-day goddess, her hair a waterfall of copper down her back, held my hand.
“Let’s go,” she said.
She picked up the camera bag and tossed the blanket over my shoulder. Braless in a camisole, wearing tight jean shorts and flipflops, she guided me through the woods to an elder circle of trees. Trees as tall as skyscrapers. She stopped at the periphery, lifted the camera and waved me to the center. I stood tall and relaxed my head back to see into the treetops. Those giant ambassadors of life formed a ring into the coastal sky. The noon sun only fit through for a few minutes each day when the fog blanket lifted from a sea breeze. The redwoods had been there for hundreds of years, shedding and releasing bits of self to the ground. I tightened every muscle I could and imagined roots reaching for the earth’s core, then kneeled. On bare knees, using both hands, I shoveled through the damp loam, hoisting out black matter, full of pungent roots, stems, beetles and leaves. Centipedes scurried. Redwood needles crunched as I leaned in and with hands as scoops rhythmically hollowed out a hole the length and width of my body. I reclined with the blanket into the trench. Faith knelt to push mounds of soil over me. Dirt sifted through the weave to my skin.
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“Shall I cover your head?” She smiled, made a rascal face and with fists full of dirt scream-laughed.
“Wait! No!” I squeezed my eyes shut.
She loosened her hands and tree litter fluttered; then she opened them all the way. Dirt fell over my face, and she scream-laughed louder.
“Just a little,” she said in a baby voice.
Trying not to laugh, I spat grit. “It’s not me I am burying, it’s my old-self.”
She reached down and brushed dirt from my eyes, then positioned herself behind the camera and became invisible. Time, measured by loss, held me tight in heavy soil. At first, I shallow-breathed; then my heartbeat slowed and my lungs relaxed into long deep breaths. The wind stilled. No sounds of birds or rustling trees. Not one wobble. Expecting to feel anxious, instead, I calmed into the earth. Formless forming. I gyroscoped in a planetary dress, spun for the moon, and released the old-self.
A breeze swept through, sounding like applause. Trees swayed. I listened to the wind pray to the part of me gone. Faith, her eye to the camera viewfinder, captured images while I observed the whole of my life. In a nameless grave, no wake or sorrow, a place to rest in peace, I said goodbye to who I used to be.
Approaching dusk, twilight through trees splintered to the forest floor, but we still had time for one more round of images. I shook the blanket free of dirt and leaves. Faith draped the blanket over her body and walked towards a tight ring of infant redwoods, the center parent tree a dead stump.
She leaned into one of the baby trees, her feet dark with forest dust, and stretched an arm of Nanda’s blanket around the trunk, grasped a blanket hand, pulled it full circle and wept. The pang of sorrow didn’t strike me; instead, I felt joy.
There is no perfect order in life and death. I no longer expected to die before my kids.
Faith held Nanda, Nanda held the baby tree, the baby trees held the lost mother, all of them held me as I held onto my new-self.
Jane Edberg has recently completed an illustrated memoir called The Fine Art of Grieving. She writes memoir, flash, and poetry. Her work has been featured in Cholla Needles, Worthing Flash, Gyroscope Review, and BAM 42 Stories Anthology. She holds a Master of Fine Arts from the University of California, Davis, and currently teaches writing at California State University Monterey Bay’s OLLI Program. She is the arts editor and contributing editor at The Journal of Radical Wonder. You can find her on Instagram and Facebook @thefineartofgrieving, and at https://www.janeedberg.com/
