Vodka Yonic features a rotating cast of women and nonbinary writers from around the world sharing stories that are alternately humorous, sobering, intellectual, erotic, religious or painfully personal. You never know what you’ll find in this column, but we hope this potent mix of stories encourages conversation.
It was COVID-19 that brought me again to the place where I will be buried. I find myself cringing at the term COVID-19 — abrupt and medical, punctuating sentences that should sway and dance like an ebbing tide. On a bitter Saturday morning, my mother, my brother and I found ourselves once more in the town to which all Ridley lives inevitably circle back. The relative whose service we were attending was my grandfather’s cousin, a woman of the world if there ever was one, who touched every ocean in a fever to leave Murfreesboro behind, only to find herself buried there.
A small mix of mystery relatives and familiar faces gathered at the family plot, spilling out from the green-canopied tent in an effort to keep our distance, scattered like marbles left out in the rain. It was a stark contrast to the funerals of our past — completed chapters of a sweeping Southern saga, tasting of sweet river water and borne out by old Baptist hymns. But no matter the venue, weather or circumstances, you send all Ridleys off the same way: with music, with words and with drama.
Before that Saturday, I had visited the plot only a handful of times. I’d stayed up the street at my great-grandmother’s house many times over the past four years, and each night as I lay in bed, I wondered how long it would take me to get to the cemetery. I often tried to will myself to dress and walk the half-mile to see my father’s grave for the first time — to feel the soft dirt as I sink to my knees; to run my fingers over the name he shares with my brother and the date that has punctuated every year since.
But I never did. I chose instead to envision our family plot the way I thought it should be. My grandmother and grandfather holding hands beneath the earth, my father forever gazing up at the great magnolia that braces the Ridley headstone, watching the seasons change. In my mind, it was not a place of devastation, but somewhere I could speak aloud to the ghosts whose eulogies I’d memorized.
We left Nashville early on the morning of the service. I carried in my lap the bouquet we brought to lay on my father’s grave, a mess of hydrangeas and calla lilies and flowers I couldn’t identify, though he would’ve been able to. We arrived and got out of the car, following Mama. His grave was just a few strides from the pavement, beside my grandmother’s. Among the hundreds of other headstones, they were like two blades of grass in a yard. The magnolia tree and the rest of the Ridleys were hundreds of feet away, but the distance was nothing, as long as I knew where to go. Mama touched the stone as we set the flowers down, all hoping for rain so they might last just a few days longer.
An hour later, as my uncle stood to deliver the eulogy, a tear turned cold against my cheek. I cried for him, in years past and now again, for shouldering alone the burden of outliving everyone else. And that morning, underneath the magnolia, his hands broke my heart. They shook as he drew the paper from his pocket, and I could still feel the same tremble in my own hands from four years earlier.
So much having to do with the ritual of death had already been stolen by the circumstances of the year. The grieving of each individual life lost is buried under endless reports of more, and the loss for each family made to seem less significant by the whole. For my family, there had been no last bedside moment, no pulpit upon which to rest the page. There was no reception or dramatic church organ, and the absence of touch and intimacy in the age of a pandemic made a cold day colder. But, by God, there were words, and on them a Ridley was carried away.
That night, it rained. The heavens opened up over Nashville and Murfreesboro, saturating the ground. Creeks swelled over their banks and ran into open meadows as Tennessee cried for what she had lost. But the next morning, as the sun rose over the land of the living and the fields of the dead, dawn burnished magnolia leaves gold. The tombstone flowers we laid the day before perked up, turning their petaled heads to the full light of a new day.
