It’s a really old city
Stuck between the dead and the living
So I thought to myself,
Sitting on a graveyard shelf
As the echo of heartbeats,
From the ground below my feet
Filled a cemetery
In the center of Queens

I started running the maze of
The names and the dates, some
Older than others the skyscrapers, little tombstone brothers
With Manhattan behind her, three million stunning reminders
Built a cemetery
In the center of Queens

So how do you do it,
With just words and just music,
Capture the feeling that my earth is somebody’s ceiling
Can I deliver in sound
The weight of the ground
Of a cemetery
In the center of Queens

There’s a history through her 
Sent to us as a gift from the future
To show us the proof
More than that, it’s to dare us to move
And to open our eyes and to learn from the sky
From a cemetery
In the center of Queens

It’s odd, you know. That I can so casually comment that I’m leaving the cemetery if someone calls my phone in one of those moments. And hearing the stunned silence from the other end of the line just emphasizes it. But that is normal, at least for me. And certainly for now. That’s the place where I go to visit my son. And remember the all too small casket that holds his now lifeless body.

It didn’t use to be though. Normal, that is.

I guess I’ve never really had an issue with cemeteries. They’ve never scared me or made me uncomfortable. I never got this impending sense of doom. I still don’t. I always find it interesting to navigate through them. And picture the people who now call that ground home.

I wonder what they were like. What they loved. If they loved. It’s so surreal how much history a few acres of land can hold.

My son has called his space home now for almost 4 months. Today makes it officially 5 months since he had to leave, but it took over a month to actually get him buried due to the gross negligence of the hospital where he passed.

Sometimes I wake up and still think that maybe he’ll wake up next to me. It’s worse after I dream of him. Waking up from those moments are the worst. It’s weird though. Even when I dream of him, I know he’s dead. It always seems to happen that he just magically wakes up and I get to take him home, but even in my dream, I know that he’s dead. Sometimes I question it, but typically I’m just so happy that I scoop him up and run away.

I wish it really did work like that. I wish he could just wake back up somehow and come home with me again. No one will ever understand how entirely big and lonely this 700 sq foot condo is now. When he was here there didn’t seem to be enough room for us, but now it just seems larger than life. That’s odd to me.

And I’ve spent the past few months house hunting, trying to find anywhere to get me out of this postwar place. But it’s hard to picture a place and what your family should be doing it in, when you don’t have any part of your family left. Besides the dog anyways. Sometimes I justify that I’m looking for a house to give Lola a nice back yard. These 700 sq feet are probably in fact still too small for her.

But when I see these places, all I see is the loss of both my son and his father. And what my family was supposed to be. And in those moments I’m happy to go back to my little 700. Postwar. Family-less. No room to grow. No room to go. In any direction. Besides the cemetery. Which is where I’m off to now. To mourn the loss of my son. The loss of my family. And the loss of myself.