I think the title, Visiting Graves, is a key part of what makes this piece powerful, because the title has multiple meanings. It unifies the essay and allows it to resonate on multiple levels.
He's not literally writing about the traditional Southern activity of cemetery visiting, which is what came to mind for me initially, but the figure of visiting a cemetery is the experience of the essay itself. Visiting graves was, in my part of the South, a pastime for many. My mother dragged me through sweaty musty cemeteries throughout my childhood, searching for the graves of our ancestors. In elementary school we had a field trip to a cemetery, where we all carried large pieces of thin paper and black cray-pas, so we could do rubbings of gravestones. I already knew how, because my mother or my Aunt had shown me on other family trips. It was February, and cold, we were ten and eleven years old, and we knelt in the damp dirt and pressed our paper against the old rough stone to capture images of dates and crosses, then walked back to the parking lot with our chosen rubbings rolled under our arms and left the dead behind. I suppose no one does this anymore, now we all have a camera in our phone; there's no need to rub a black stick of wax against a moldering slab of granite.
These were the associations in my mind when I began reading Visiting Graves. Sharpe is writing about losses, especially the illness and impending loss of his mother, by telling a story about visiting Elvis grave. I love the way we first hear about Elvis as "the man" in a cardboard cutout. We know it's likely to mean the King of Rock'n'Roll. His restraint in not telling all is played against the "tell all" nature of the title. The explicit purpose of the visit is slowly revealed to us, as is the fact that his mother is probably dying. The careful revealing of facts is also part of the magic of the story. Sharpe is precise and masterful in the timing and placement of detail, which is important in memoir.
I was a bit off-put by the Gone With the Wind longings at the beginning of the piece, and this is something I will be grappling with each time I address the subject of the South. (On a personal note, it was nice to read someone who knew the proper restaurants to go to in Memphis. Authenticity - a Southern obsession.)
I admire his descriptive passages about music -- I could hear what he was describing. This is something I'm always listening for and trying to do in my own writing.
I found Visiting Graves to be a beautiful, delicate and moving way to write about family, affection and loss. By focusing on a pilgrimage, on other deaths, on a real and an imagined Elvis (Hound Dog), Sharpe meanders through a cemetery of his family.
I like this a lot. Music and food carry so much of place and identity. Why? These days finally people are taking seriously writing and studying food and how regional and local ingredients play such a powerful and sensual role in cooking. It's a way we carry this relationship and share it with others. Serving food, serving the right type of food for different situations, etc. Real rituals are fading away and this is b/c our relationships with the land and physical engagement with it are being replaced and homogenized. Not good for the body that registers the world via the senses before them where they are. This is a foundational aspect of our physiology that can't be replaced or faked. I like the memories here of etching with the hands feeling and seeing the gravestone markings and worn character emerge before you as you created these drawings and art works of history. It makes me think of how I"m not so sure cremation is so good as we really have no communal place to go now to be in the company of the dead. We're losing the dead. I have my father's ashes in a cookie jar by the window. But maybe it would be better if he had a grave. There's a great essay about this loss of the dead by WS Sebald as he meditates on this subject on a walk in Corsica.
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