A story my brother told me about an ordinary afternoon at Evergreen Cemetery in 1994 left me with an image I never witnessed. More than three decades later, I’m still trying to understand why it never left me.
I remember almost nothing about that afternoon in 1994… only the image that followed me out of it.
From the Archive
Who can say why we hold on to certain obscurities? Sometimes the most trivial details can quietly take root and grow into some of our most enduring memories. Stranger still are those formed around moments we never actually witnessed firsthand. One such image entered my life on an otherwise ordinary day in the spring of 1994. But to fully grasp how that moment found its way onto the biological hard drive that my long-term memory is so often compared to, I have to return to the summer of ’93, when my brother got his first car and, shortly thereafter, the two of us discovered the cemetery where it would eventually take shape.
My older brother was entering his senior year of high school and was on the cusp of turning 18. Our parents knew someone in our extended family who was selling an old 1980 four-door Mercury Zephyr. I remember the four of us riding out to the country one day in August ’93 to look at the car and take it for a test drive. This was my brother’s first shot at owning a vehicle, and I don’t recall it taking much convincing for him to pull the trigger. If memory serves, he paid $400 cash for it and drove away a happy first-time car owner.
This was also the beginning of a special time in our relationship. I was turning 13 and about to experience my first major growth spurt. Psychologically, I was beginning to move beyond the preteen kid stuff that had so often made me the annoying little tag-along brother my older sibling looked to avoid rather than try to bond with, especially in social settings. For the first time, we were beginning to connect through shared interests, philosophies, and the common struggles of being two unusually odd Virgos who were routinely misunderstood. With his own car and the freedom to go wherever he wanted, whenever he wanted, my brother had reached that familiar milestone when a young adult realizes he is finally about to experience life on his own terms. Getting to share that freedom with him brought us closer and shifted my place in his life from little brother to something closer to a buddy.
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