Fascinated by fences

Growing up, I found my way to the river, escaping into the woods every day that I could. Crossing the street and moving past the shore, through the towering skunk weed and the fallen down trees I’d build up my fort, stock up my supplies, and let myself rest. Tucking myself into the space on a larger than life rock that felt built just for me, I’d stare up at the moving clouds or down at the minnows moving in unison to music I could not hear. Making my way across the street and over the log that laid itself down above the flowing river I found my portal, the passageway carrying me from one world to another. It was a miracle each time - this escape, this refuge.

Living in the city now, I still go out walking every day. Sometimes I make my way to the cemetery, or more accurately, to the far edge of the cemetery. I find the footpath that travels along the fence separating one world from another. Well-manicured rolling lawns with marble headstones dotting the landscape on one side, city streets and gardens on the other, and my secret wooded walkway weaving its way in between.

People have been protesting the fence that separates the woods from the cemetery for years. You don’t have to look hard to see the patches of wire dutifully placed by the caretakers covering the roughly bent chain link or the cut out holes. Here along the edge where the fence goes largely unseen, the eye pleasing wrought iron that encircles the city-facing edges of the cemetery has been replaced with chain link fencing, and in one particularly well-traveled entry way, that chain link fence is topped with barbed wire.

This morning I found myself wondering, who decided there needed to be barbed wire to separate the living from the dead? What was so dangerous that it warranted a barrier this menacing and severe?

I know from the neighborhood that it’s mostly kids who travel between these worlds. Fascinated by the wide open spaces and the wild turkeys that roam free in the graveyard, they tuck themselves under or over the fence and find freedom - a place with fewer living people than anywhere else in the city, a break from the buses and cars and busyness that surrounds them. Teenagers make the trip, too. Daring to hop the fence, they reject the boundaries adults have set up to keep things neat and clean. They challenge themselves and each other to encounter what scares them, entering the alternate universe of the cemetery to discover who they are in the land of the living.

Out on the in-between path, I saw something new this morning. A piece of the barbed wire fencing had been swallowed up entirely by a tree that had grown around it. Passing through cleanly, one side to the other, the tree had grown up anyway. Branches reaching toward the sky, the tree offered a new ladder to shimmy up and over the barbed wire that flowed through its very being. I hate to anthropomorphize nature, but it made me smile to imagine the tree laughing at the barriers we humans try to create to separate ourselves from each other, the living from the dead.

I also couldn’t help but wonder if this isn’t what living with loss looks like. The barbs buried deep inside of us, never fully dissolved, because the love is there, too. Still present, even as we grow around the pain, the emptiness, the memories we don’t want to forget. What if instead of trying to lose the loss we embody it, metabolize it, grow with it and around it, grateful for the ways that love and loss dissolve the illusions of separation we put in place between the living and the dead.