Mount Auburn Cemetery

I wear a kitschy straw hat. I carry free maps. I spend every afternoon talking to strangers. I am a tour guide, and I trade in fleeting connections.

It’s a strange profession. Off-duty, I barely register the thousands of tourists who flood Harvard Yard every day. They operate in the background of my experience, just noisy chatter and selfie sticks and inconvenient sidewalk-blocking mobs. On-duty, I become their friend. I am “The Harvard Student”—perky, accessible, brimming with stories and trivia and self-deprecation. I even come with a summary: “I’m Laura and I’ll be your tour guide today! A little bit about me: I’m a rising sophomore, I study English, and I’m a proud Canadian.” I wave, they wave, and—voilà!—everyone has met “The Harvard Student”.

I’ve repeated that spiel three or four dozen times since the beginning of the summer. It’s concise; it’s true; it’s a perfectly appropriate tour introduction. I’m caught by surprise, then, when I first begin to feel like a cheat. I can’t explain the sensation. It’s not based on reason—these are the basic facts of my life. Sure, they don’t sum me up entirely, but that should be obvious. So why, when I tell them as my story, do I feel like a liar?

I’m unable to process the way I present myself to strangers while I’m standing in a space full of strangers. Harvard Square is too loud, too demanding. On the other hand, I’m unwilling to practice storytelling in an empty room. Instead, I compromise and visit Mount Auburn Cemetery in (morbid) search of an uncritical audience.

Inside the gate, the cemetery stretches in a vast expanse of low-hanging trees and rolling hills. Dainty signs mark paths that ramble and curve. I choose one at random and follow it until I spill out into a small bay, ringed by shallow steps and flooded by a lacy magnolia. I’m not sure what I’m looking for. A story, I suppose. I live by stories. I use them to read the world. What is a life without a narrative? Something transient, and impenetrable, and terrifying to me.

I stop first at the grave of Simeon E. Smith (1799 – 1865). It’s impossible not to—his final resting place looks like the Washington Monument. There’s no story here, though. Just a name and two dates. I squint and give the man a life in politics. Mid-level politics. Ineffectual politics. The product of too much compassion and not enough grit. And I bet- I stop myself. I’ve constructed my fiction on nothing, made reckless by the grim-lipped silence of the stone. I scan the monument for more clues and find none.

I walk on. Pine Avenue takes me to Greenbriar Path, and I loop around a number of neatly mulched trails before finding myself at the edge of the cemetery. I pass a weathered slab marked only “Henry”; I pass the joint stone of Regina E. Horn and Martha A. Bense; I pass the tablet commemorating the entire Smith family, ten children and all. I read every inscription slashed into every stone and I reach for the texture of the lives lived within but my fingers meet only marble.

I start to realize that epitaphs aren’t flash fiction. In truth, I don’t know what I was expecting—I think I was hoping for some magic solution, some ancient wisdom, some template for condensing a life into words that I could carve into a few square feet or shout at tired tourists or whisper to myself when I get a little lost.

Speaking of getting lost, I suddenly find myself climbing a steep little staircase away from the main trail, though I don’t recall making the decision to leave the path. At the top, I’m forced to a stop by a tiny gate encircling a tiny patch of grass. The plot contains three stones. The first is colossal, a concrete behemoth marked “Norcross”. The second and third are unremarkable. So exaggeratedly unremarkable, in fact, that it takes me a moment to notice that they face backward.

I push on the low gate. It does not swing open.

For several long moments, I do not react. This is not a chatty memorial. It beckoned me up the stairs then slapped me for the intrusion. I can’t wrap my brain around the contradiction. Why announce that you have a story if you aren’t willing to share it? I look harder.

Norcross. The name is all I have. Well, the name and three stones. I don’t even know the nature of the relationship among the three. Do they mark two parents and a child? Two spouses and an ex? I don’t know who was involved, or what that meant, or why the central pillar towers so aggressively over its fellows. These people represented themselves with as little information as they could—and my gut reaction is irritation. I feel shut out, teased. I’m pretty sure I’m entitled to their story: I did, after all, walk all this way.

But as I stand torn on that top step, my irritation fades. I find myself crouching, then sitting, then leaning against that low gate, and I start to see a kind of quiet grace in these backward headstones. Maybe reticence isn’t always malicious; maybe a blank page isn’t always a barb.

How else could the Norcrosses have summed up their lives? There’s room for some adjectives, but they’d have made only a caricature. There’s room for some facts, but they’d have made only a sketch. And there’s room for a name. The longer I stare at this particular name on this particular stone, the more I start to accept that perhaps that is the best anyone can do. Perhaps I can’t pare down my story at all. Perhaps I don’t need to.

I think my story’s already been summarized. And sure, my summary might be illegible to everyone but me, but that doesn’t invalidate my reading. My summary encapsulates every experience I’ve ever had. I’ve worn it and I’ve lived in it and I’ve filled it with meaning every day of my life.

I can tell tourists my name.

Laura E. Hatt ’18 is an English concentrator living in Kirkland House.