My mother and I walk at Rose Hill. We photograph each otherbending toward the names that belong to us: our Kittie, our MostExcellent Samuel Shannon. It is raining.Though we expected the dead, there is nothing but grass, trees.Only the stones in their various shades of gray to disrupt thegentle arch of the hill as it dips into the valley.The rain touches everything, indiscriminate, creeps into theruffled folds even before the carnation touches the stone.This is a map of the graveyard. I stand above the grave of KittieShannon. The tree is a mathematical structure. Some say the rootsare a mirror image of the tree itself.One requires an imagination to visit with the dead in such a place.Have you ever stopped to think how many drops of blood are inyour body that are actually related to these people? Maybe halfa drop.A carnation is nothing. How much does it weigh?Both graves, in the photographs, the days of their funerals, youcan’t tell one from the other. Our Kittie our Samuel, buried inpounds and pounds of flowers.What happens to the coffin when it rains? No one tells you thesethings.A raindrop falls. Our image slips along its glassy surface , theliving and the dead all of us. Look quick, your stone face, your coldbody beneath the umbrella plummeting to the earth.What do you think they’re thinking down there for nearly twohundred years? Are they sick of what they’re wearing? And whathas become of his cufflinks?My mother’s body in a raindrop, a flash in a crystal ball no biggerthan a fingernail, smaller than a fingernail.Are they not like sunken ships? Can we not think that of them,lying in the dark, blind? But don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.I don’t want to think about that. I want to be more related thanthat.If we have seen the photographs, read the letters in their ownhandwriting, the ink from their pens. The pen in the hand. If weentered their house.The graveyard was quite lovely. Don’t you think it was lovely, howquiet it was?