Unknown

I went back to the Ethel Cemetery yesterday. It's tiny, but very open, sparsely populated (as my brother dryly quipped, "No one lives there"), and protected by a rank of trees to the north. The Olsens rule in state from the center of the lawn with their own grove of three cedars and a granite monument. The Ladues guard the west fence with the Clements, and there are five babies in the space of forty feet and as many years. Back under a rogue lilac in the northwest corner are three stones so time-worn they can't be read without the aid of a rubbing. And back near the Olsens, nearly dead-middle, in a grave with one word: "Unknown."

People are always getting bothered by unknown graves in books or movies, bothered so much that they set out on impossible detective ventures, goaded on by "they know not what," only to discover at the reveal that it is the mother/brother/grandfather/child they never knew they had, who doubtless died giving birth/saving the current curious cat.

I'll admit the temptation to investigate is not absent.

But as I sat there is the early evening light, having placed a sentimental bunch of Queen Anne's Lace on the red stone, I was more preoccupied with the mystery of the thing than its unraveling. This Unknown used to be somebody. I don't know if they were male or female, old or young, white or black, Asian or American Indian. I don't know if they died of natural causes or unnatural. They may have been sweetness itself, mourned by hundreds who would never find them. They might have been a murderer, killed in self-defense before any formal introduction. Perhaps they were found in the river, washed down from who knows where, unrecognizable even as close kin.

This last is the idea that sticks in my mind. In July my good friend Elliott was lost to the ocean, probably in the deadly current named after the very street on which he lives. After two weeks he was found, washed up only two miles from where he drowned. But he mightn't have been. If he had caught the left curl of the rip tide instead of the right, he could have ended up in Northern California, to be found by someone who would never know who he was. In some Unknown grave in Mendicino would have lain a 16 year old blond haired, blue-eyed boy who gave great hugs, loved the Beatles, and begged me to paint his portrait back stage while Tevye sang If I Were a Rich Man. I'm glad I sketched him then because I had to give the painting to his family at the memorial.

So I visit the Unknown grave, and remember. For my own sake and for Elliott's. No one wants to be forgotten.