Philip Roth - Everyman

But how does one voluntarily choose to leave our fullness for that endless nothing? How would he do it? Could he lie there calmly saying goodbye? Had he Millicent Kramer's strength to eradicate everything? She was his age. Why not? In a bind like hers, what's a few years more or less? Who would dare to challenge her with leaving life precipitously? I must, I must, he thought, my six stents tell me I must one day soon fearlessly say goodbye. But leaving Nancy – I can't do it! The things that could happen to her on the way to school! His daughter left behind with no more of him for protection than their biological bond! And he bereft for eternity of her morning phone calls! He saw himself racing in every direction at once through downtown Elizabeth's main intersection – the unsuccessful father, the envious brother, the duplicitous husband, the helpless son – and only blocks from his family's jewelry store crying out for the cast of kin on whom he could not gain no matter how hard he pursued them. "Momma, Poppa, Howie, Phoebe, Nancy, Randy, Lonny – if only I'd known how to do it! Can't you hear me? I'm leaving! It's over and I'm leaving you all behind!" And those vanishing as fast from him as he from them turned just their heads to cry out in turn, and all too meaningfully, "Too late!"

Leaving – the very word that had conveyed him into breathless, panic-filled wakefulness, delivered alive from embracing a corpse.

He never made it to New York. Traveling north on the Jersey Turnpike, he remembered that just south of Newark Airport was the exit to the cemetery where his parents were buried, and when he reached there, he pulled off the turnpike and followed the road that twisted through a decrepit residential neighborhood and then past a grim old elementary school until it ended at a beat-up truck thoroughfare that bordered the five or so acres of Jewish cemetery. At the far end of the cemetery was a vacant street where driving instructors took their students to learn to make a U-turn. He edged the car slowly through the open, spiked gate and parked opposite a small building that must once have been a prayer house and was now a dilapidated, hollowed-out ruin. The synagogue that had administered the cemetery's affairs had been disbanded years ago when its congregants had moved to the Union, Essex, and Morris County suburbs, and it didn't look as if anyone was taking care of anything anymore. The earth was giving way and sinking around many of the graves, and footstones everywhere had tumbled onto their sides, and all this was not even in the original graveyard where his grandparents were buried, amid hundreds of darkened tombstones packed tightly together, but in the newer sections where the granite markers dated from the second half of the twentieth century. He had noticed none of this when they had assembled to bury his father. All he'd seen then was the casket resting on the belts that spanned the open grave. Plain and modest though it was, it took up the world. Then followed the brutality of the burial and the mouth full of dust.

In just the past month he had been among the mourners at two funerals in two different cemeteries in Monmouth County, both rather less dreary than this one, and less dangerous, too. During recent decades, aside from vandals who damaged and destroyed the stones and the outbuildings where his parents were buried, there were muggers who worked the cemetery as well. In broad daylight they preyed upon the elderly who would occasionally show up alone or in pairs to spend time visiting a family gravesite. At his father's burial he had been informed by the rabbi that, if he was on his own, it would be wisest to visit his mother and father during the High Holy Day period, when the local police department, at the request of a committee of cemetery chairmen, had agreed to provide protection for the observant who turned out to recite the appropriate psalms and remember their dead. He had listened to the rabbi and nodded his head, but as he did not number himself among the believers, let alone the observant, and had a decided aversion to the High Holy Days, he would never choose to come to the cemetery then.

The dead were the two women in his class who'd had cancer and who'd died within a week of each other. There were many people from Starfish Beach at these funerals. As he looked around he could not help speculating about who among them would be killed off next. Everyone thinks at some time or other that in a hundred years no one now alive will be on earth – the overwhelming force will sweep the place clean. But he was thinking in terms of days. He was musing like a marked man.

There was a short, plump elderly woman at both the funerals who wept so uncontrollably that she seemed more than a mere friend of the dead and instead, impossibly, the mother of both. At the second funeral, she stood and sobbed only a few feet from him and the overweight stranger next to him, who he assumed was her husband, even though (or perhaps because), with his arms crossed and his teeth clenched and his chin in the air, he remained strikingly aloof and apart from her, an indifferent spectator who refused any longer to put up with this person. If anything, her tears would seem to have aroused bitter contempt rather than sympathetic concern, because in the midst of the funeral, as the rabbi was intoning in English the words of the prayer book, the husband turned unbidden and impatiently asked, "You know why she's carrying on like that?" "I believe I do," he whispered back, meaning by this, It's because it is for her as it's been for me ever since I was a boy. It's because it is for her as it is for everyone. It's because life's most disturbing intensity is death. It's because death is so unjust. It's because once one has tasted life, death does not even seem natural. I had thought – secretly I was certain – that life goes on and on. "Well, you're wrong," the man said flatly, as though having read his mind. "She's like that all the time. That has been the story for fifty years," he added with an unforgiving scowl. "She's like that because she isn't eighteen anymore."

His parents were situated close to the perimeter of the cemetery, and it was a while before he found their graves by the iron fence that separated the last row of burial plots from a narrow side street that appeared to be a makeshift rest stop for truckers taking a break from their turnpike run. In the years since he'd last been here, he'd forgotten the effect the first sight of the headstone had on him. He saw their two names carved there, and he was incapacitated by the kind of sobbing that overpowers babies and leaves them limp. He elicited easily enough his last recollection of each of them – the hospital recollection – but when he tried to call up the earliest recollection, the effort to reach as far back as he could in their common past caused a second wave of feeling to overwhelm him.

They were just bones, bones in a box, but their bones were his bones, and he stood as close to the bones as he could, as though the proximity might link him up with them and mitigate the isolation born of losing his future and reconnect him with all that had gone. For the next hour and a half, those bones were the things that mattered most. They were all that mattered, despite the impingement of the neglected cemetery's environment of decay. Once he was with those bones he could not leave them, couldn't not talk to them, couldn't but listen to them when they spoke. Between him and those bones there was a great deal going on, far more than now transpired between him and those still clad in their flesh. The flesh melts away but the bones endure. The bones were the only solace there was to one who put no stock in an afterlife and knew without a doubt that God was a fiction and this was the only life he'd have. As young Phoebe might have put it back when they first met, it was not going too far to say that his deepest pleasure now was at the cemetery. Here alone contentment was attainable.