"It could be adjacent to a botanical garden and I wouldn't give a cats fart," Boris said sternly, "I'm dead, what's the view mean to me?"
This hadn't been the enjoyable afternoon Father Krickett had planned it to be. Walking through Ash Cemetery, the two men had looked at over a dozen potential resting places, and not a single one had done anything for them. Or rather, for Boris.
"It isn't all about you, it's also about the people who are coming to visit you!" John replied, annoyed.
"Oh, my death isn't all about me? Is there one goddamned thing in this world that is all about you when it happens? Why's everyone else always gonna be in consideration when it comes to your life altering moments? Ridiculous. Put me in a empty field next to a toxic river, it's the same sort of thing. Six feet under the ground, can't enjoy the place. But I suppose I should think of others comfort, not my own."
John leaned on a headstone and sighed. He ran a hand through his blonde hair, then put another piece of gum in his mouth.
"There are...stipulations one has to make when one dies," John said, "things you must consider. Yeah. You're right. You're dead, what do you care what the view is? But don't you want people to come visit you? You visit Polly all the time. Don't you want that? And people won't wanna visit an empty field next to a toxic river, Boris, they just won't. All you're doing is depriving yourself of visitation rights."
"Again, what do I care, I'm dead," Boris replied, leaning against a tree and crossing his arms; he exhaled and groaned, "Listen, John, I...I get where you're coming from, I do. I guess I'm just a little frazzled dealing with this. It's so...weird. I guess I always expected someone else to pick these things out for me. Ya know, manage my loose ends. It never once occurred to me that I be healthy enough to do it myself when the time came, so it's a little jarring picking out a final resting place."
Boris looked down at his shoes and thought about Polly. About where she was buried.
"I wish," Boris continued, "that it was easier to be selfish without sounding selfish. This is the one thing that should be for me. Everything else throughout my life has been for the benefit of others. I'm not allowed even one thing, even in death?"
Father Krickett cricked his neck, thinking about this. In a sense, Boris was right. So much of life was about pleasing others, doing what's best for those around you, falling to the whims of parents, partners, bosses, friends. When was a person allowed to be selfish without it seeming inherently selfish? He pulled at the sleeves of his turtleneck and sighed, running a hand down his face.
"When my brother died," John said, "we interred him at a local graveyard, you know, so we could come see him. But the thing was, he had always had issues with, what's it called, agoraphobia. He hated being outside a lot of the times. The irony of being placed in a cemetery wasn't lost on him, I'm sure. So we would visit him, but the entire time, all I could manage to think was how unhappy he must be to be out in the open like this, amongst strangers, something else he had a problem with. If it were up to him, he'd likely have chosen to be cremated."
Boris lit up a cigar and took a puff, listening as John continued.
"But nobody wants to carry a person throughout their life," John added, "that's the thing. You're a burden in life and a burden in death. You're born and suddenly everyone's lives have to alter to make room for your presence. You die, and suddenly everyone has to change their schedules to plan for and attend your services. And all that in between time? You're mostly a burden then too."
"This is horribly depressing," Boris said, making John chuckle.
"Yeah, well, that's life," John said, "It's too hard for mom and dad to keep him, find a place for the urn, to have walk by it everyday. Cemeteries...they allow the living a sense of removal. You aren't in immediate proximity, so you don't have to think about them, and the pain lessens quicker as a result. Not for everyone, everybody's grief works differently, but I'd say that's usually the way it goes down. Again...a burden to others, even when you're no longer alive."
"So what you're saying is that the dead deserve the right to be selfish?" Boris asked, tapping the ash from his cigar on a nearby headstone.
"Hey, come on, that's disrespectful," John said.
"Yeah I'm sure Franklin Adams of 1874 is really going to throw a fit," Boris remarked, and John sighed.
"What I'm saying," John continued, "is that yes, you're not wrong, the dead deserve the right to be selfish, and yes, most of life is about pleasing others or bending to their wills. But that doesn't mean people want to visit an empty field next to a toxic river if they want to see you."
"If people love you enough, they won't care where you're buried," Boris said, "ask those people who set up memorials at car crashes on the side of the highway."
John threw his arms up in frustration and turned, walking on, Boris walking slowly behind him.
"Fine!" Father Krickett said loudly, "fine, we'll throw you in a dumpset and fill it with cement! Or, or better yet, how about this, how about we attach you to an anchor and we throw you to the bottom of the ocean!"
"Well now you're just being ridiculous," Boris said, making John groan while also laughing.
Father Krickett had seen plenty of people struggle with their mortality. Going to the home, reading last rights, if there was one thing he was intimately familiar with, it was helping the soon to be deceased come to terms with their mortality. But this was different. This was personal. Boris wasn't just a resident at the home (hell, he hadn't lived at the home for over a year or so now) he was someone involved closely in John's day to day life. Someone who meant something very deep to him. Why was he making this so difficult?
"I probably should've died in the accident," Boris said, and this caught Father Krickett's attention.
"Hmm?" John asked, turning to face him again.
"The accident, the one Ellen had when she was little," Boris said, "all things considered, I likely should've died then. But I didn't. Instead, I got a ticking time bomb inside of me that I was unaware of. But I should've, and imagine if I had. That would've been poetic justice for the horrors I helped usher into others lives. I should've been held more responsible for my actions. Instead, I was literally allowed to walk away from it unscathed, while my daughter couldn't walk for most of her life."
"Do you...do you wish you had died then?" John asked.
"I don't know," Boris said, shrugging, "I just know that it would've made things a lot easier. Wouldn't be here now, doing this, for instance."
"Oh, I'm sorry, is this complicating your day?" John asked, smirking.
"No, it's complicating yours," Boris said, and John stopped smirking. The wind seemed to stop blowing, and the air in the cemetery went dead silent. Just the gentle rustle of leaves overhead. John adjusted the neck of his turtleneck, then approached Boris slowly.
"What...what do you mean?" John asked.
"Let's face it, this is harder for you than it is for me," Boris said, "I've accepted it. It was...scary, at first, but at this point, I've accepted it. But you...you still haven't. You likely never will, having seen how you deal with other losses in your life, and that isn't a dig at you, John, it's just a recognition of your personality. So all of this...shopping for a coffin, looking for a resting place, this is performative. It's to ease your pain. Your anguish. Feeling like you're doing everything you can while you can."
Father Krickett bit his lip and nodded slowly. Boris wasn't wrong.
"I don't...I don't want you to die, I mean, yeah," John said, his voice cracking, "nobody wants anyone they care about to die. I've lost my brother, my boyfriend, so many people in my life that mattered to me. I was mad about surviving my car accident too, so I know that feeling all too well. After losing Steven, I closed myself off. I didn't allow myself to become close with anyone again because I knew firsthand the pain that you felt when you inevitably lost them. Until you, Boris. Until I met you. You're the first person I've opened up to in years. And a lot of that was because of how we both viewed the world. But also because I could see in you what I saw in them, what I missed in them, and in some warped way it was like I had them back."
Boris took a long puff on his cigar, then stubbed it out entirely, exhaling smoke into the air and tossing the butt on the ground.
"Yeah, you're not wrong. It's performative. But it isn't just for me. It isn't inherently selfish. I want you to be at peace. To have the best you can. I just wish you didn't have it right now," John said, "I wish..."
John leaned against another headstone and sighed, shaking his head.
"I wish we could've had what others had," John said.
Boris slowly approached and leaned against the headstone beside him.
"What do you mean by that?" Boris asked, "What we've had has been great."
"No, it...it has," John said, "please, don't get me wrong, but...well, we've said this before...if it were different, if you were younger, I were older, if we'd come from the same generation - either yours or mine - we could've had so much more. You admired Polly for being unashamedly out, even when she came from a generation that didn't accept it. She was brave, you acknowledged this. We could've been brave. Priests aren't supposed to fall in love. But I guess some things you can't help."
Boris smiled and put his hand on John's shoulder, causing John to look away.
"You once told me that time takes everything from us. It cannot be reasoned with, it cannot be fought, and it cannot be bargained against. It takes what it takes without compassion, but also without malice. It can't do it with either, because it isn't a living thing, it's a concept. You said memory is the only thing we have in the fight against time, and so long as we remember those we loved - even if they look nothing like we remember - then we've won. You've won. Because the idea of them is what's important. The feeling they imparted on you. Not what they looked like. That's what photographs are for."
John now looked at Boris, as Boris ran his old hand up to the young priests face and touched his cheek. John reached up and held it there.
"So once I'm gone, John," Boris said, "you're in charge of remembering me, okay?"
"Okay," John whispered, tears rolling down his face.
Boris leaned in and kissed him, and John happily kissed him back. It was a moment John had never expected to have, but Boris figured, well, this was the end. May as well give him something to remember him by. Life started to resume in the cemetery, the air began to blow again, and everything sounded more clear, more beautiful. Boris rested his forehead on John's and smiled, making John laugh anxiously. The last thing Boris ever anticipated to find in his old age was a real kind of love, but he was so happy to have met John and allowed himself to be open with him. Sure, to outsiders, it must've looked so strange. An old man and a young priest. But they didn't care. That's what love was. You ignored the strangeness and you embraced the quiet joy of the experience.
"They say the best years of your life are your 20s," Boris said, "but frankly, I'd reckon it's actually these years. The ones at the end."
"And what makes you think that?" John asked.
"You know yourself, fully, and you can be anyone you want without judgement or shame from your peers," Boris said, "if you're brave enough, of course."
"I'd say you're brave enough," John replied, both men laughing.
A pause as they just listened to the sounds of the cemetery around them.
"Hey John," Boris asked.
"Yeah?"
"You want my ashes?" Boris asked.
Another pause.
"Yeah."
***
Sister Jenn was doing some cleaning in John's office, organizing the papers on his desk and washing his windows a little. She usually did this once a week, and he'd never once acknowledged it, but she didn't mind. She didn't do it for him. She did it for the church. While wiping the window down, she heard footsteps enter the room and glanced over her shoulder to see Father Krickett standing there.
"Oh, hello," she said happily.
"Didn't know you did this," John said, "thank you, that's very considerate of you."
"Cleanliness is next to godliness," Sister Jenn said, making John chuckle as he sat at his desk. John sat in his chair, watching Sister Jenn finish her window washing, before she turned to face him and sat on his desk. She pulled her habit off and let her long blonde hair fall around her shoulders.
"What made you join the church, Jennifer?" John asked, and Jenn exhaled.
"That's a big question," she said, "I suppose it came from trying to find reason in a world without any. When you have a life where bad things happen to you, you want answers, reasons why. You can't just accept that this happens. So you turn to religion, which offers you the belief that it happens for a reason, to strengthen you. But then that doesn't exactly sit well with me, because if God loves me, why would he allow these horrible things to happen just to make me stronger? Aren't there easier, less traumatizing ways, to make someone stronger? The whole religion is nothing but contradictions, but I suppose that's where the faith comes in. Blind faith, though, don't like that. Still like questioning."
John smiled, nodding, as he reached down into his cabinet beneath his desk and pulled out a bottle of bourbon and uncorked it, putting two small glasses on the desk and pouring them both a glass. Jenn took it, hesitantly, and downed it in one go while John cautiously sipped on his.
"I hope you're happy, Jenn," John said, "with Whittle, with being you, with...with having the chance to be with the person you want. That's a very rare thing. You deserve to be happy. Not all of us get that."
"I am," Jenn said.
She put the glass back down on the table, hopped down from the desk and adjusted her frock, then told John she had to go for the night and that she'd see him tomorrow. John, now alone in his office, looked towards the stained glass windows in his office, and he turned his glass in his hand absentmindedly. So he would be the recipient of Boris's ashes. In a way, this meant that they would, in some warped way, get to be together forever. John smiled as he lifted his glass to his lips once more.
After all, Jesus did say to love everyone, didn't he?
This hadn't been the enjoyable afternoon Father Krickett had planned it to be. Walking through Ash Cemetery, the two men had looked at over a dozen potential resting places, and not a single one had done anything for them. Or rather, for Boris.
"It isn't all about you, it's also about the people who are coming to visit you!" John replied, annoyed.
"Oh, my death isn't all about me? Is there one goddamned thing in this world that is all about you when it happens? Why's everyone else always gonna be in consideration when it comes to your life altering moments? Ridiculous. Put me in a empty field next to a toxic river, it's the same sort of thing. Six feet under the ground, can't enjoy the place. But I suppose I should think of others comfort, not my own."
John leaned on a headstone and sighed. He ran a hand through his blonde hair, then put another piece of gum in his mouth.
"There are...stipulations one has to make when one dies," John said, "things you must consider. Yeah. You're right. You're dead, what do you care what the view is? But don't you want people to come visit you? You visit Polly all the time. Don't you want that? And people won't wanna visit an empty field next to a toxic river, Boris, they just won't. All you're doing is depriving yourself of visitation rights."
"Again, what do I care, I'm dead," Boris replied, leaning against a tree and crossing his arms; he exhaled and groaned, "Listen, John, I...I get where you're coming from, I do. I guess I'm just a little frazzled dealing with this. It's so...weird. I guess I always expected someone else to pick these things out for me. Ya know, manage my loose ends. It never once occurred to me that I be healthy enough to do it myself when the time came, so it's a little jarring picking out a final resting place."
Boris looked down at his shoes and thought about Polly. About where she was buried.
"I wish," Boris continued, "that it was easier to be selfish without sounding selfish. This is the one thing that should be for me. Everything else throughout my life has been for the benefit of others. I'm not allowed even one thing, even in death?"
Father Krickett cricked his neck, thinking about this. In a sense, Boris was right. So much of life was about pleasing others, doing what's best for those around you, falling to the whims of parents, partners, bosses, friends. When was a person allowed to be selfish without it seeming inherently selfish? He pulled at the sleeves of his turtleneck and sighed, running a hand down his face.
"When my brother died," John said, "we interred him at a local graveyard, you know, so we could come see him. But the thing was, he had always had issues with, what's it called, agoraphobia. He hated being outside a lot of the times. The irony of being placed in a cemetery wasn't lost on him, I'm sure. So we would visit him, but the entire time, all I could manage to think was how unhappy he must be to be out in the open like this, amongst strangers, something else he had a problem with. If it were up to him, he'd likely have chosen to be cremated."
Boris lit up a cigar and took a puff, listening as John continued.
"But nobody wants to carry a person throughout their life," John added, "that's the thing. You're a burden in life and a burden in death. You're born and suddenly everyone's lives have to alter to make room for your presence. You die, and suddenly everyone has to change their schedules to plan for and attend your services. And all that in between time? You're mostly a burden then too."
"This is horribly depressing," Boris said, making John chuckle.
"Yeah, well, that's life," John said, "It's too hard for mom and dad to keep him, find a place for the urn, to have walk by it everyday. Cemeteries...they allow the living a sense of removal. You aren't in immediate proximity, so you don't have to think about them, and the pain lessens quicker as a result. Not for everyone, everybody's grief works differently, but I'd say that's usually the way it goes down. Again...a burden to others, even when you're no longer alive."
"So what you're saying is that the dead deserve the right to be selfish?" Boris asked, tapping the ash from his cigar on a nearby headstone.
"Hey, come on, that's disrespectful," John said.
"Yeah I'm sure Franklin Adams of 1874 is really going to throw a fit," Boris remarked, and John sighed.
"What I'm saying," John continued, "is that yes, you're not wrong, the dead deserve the right to be selfish, and yes, most of life is about pleasing others or bending to their wills. But that doesn't mean people want to visit an empty field next to a toxic river if they want to see you."
"If people love you enough, they won't care where you're buried," Boris said, "ask those people who set up memorials at car crashes on the side of the highway."
John threw his arms up in frustration and turned, walking on, Boris walking slowly behind him.
"Fine!" Father Krickett said loudly, "fine, we'll throw you in a dumpset and fill it with cement! Or, or better yet, how about this, how about we attach you to an anchor and we throw you to the bottom of the ocean!"
"Well now you're just being ridiculous," Boris said, making John groan while also laughing.
Father Krickett had seen plenty of people struggle with their mortality. Going to the home, reading last rights, if there was one thing he was intimately familiar with, it was helping the soon to be deceased come to terms with their mortality. But this was different. This was personal. Boris wasn't just a resident at the home (hell, he hadn't lived at the home for over a year or so now) he was someone involved closely in John's day to day life. Someone who meant something very deep to him. Why was he making this so difficult?
"I probably should've died in the accident," Boris said, and this caught Father Krickett's attention.
"Hmm?" John asked, turning to face him again.
"The accident, the one Ellen had when she was little," Boris said, "all things considered, I likely should've died then. But I didn't. Instead, I got a ticking time bomb inside of me that I was unaware of. But I should've, and imagine if I had. That would've been poetic justice for the horrors I helped usher into others lives. I should've been held more responsible for my actions. Instead, I was literally allowed to walk away from it unscathed, while my daughter couldn't walk for most of her life."
"Do you...do you wish you had died then?" John asked.
"I don't know," Boris said, shrugging, "I just know that it would've made things a lot easier. Wouldn't be here now, doing this, for instance."
"Oh, I'm sorry, is this complicating your day?" John asked, smirking.
"No, it's complicating yours," Boris said, and John stopped smirking. The wind seemed to stop blowing, and the air in the cemetery went dead silent. Just the gentle rustle of leaves overhead. John adjusted the neck of his turtleneck, then approached Boris slowly.
"What...what do you mean?" John asked.
"Let's face it, this is harder for you than it is for me," Boris said, "I've accepted it. It was...scary, at first, but at this point, I've accepted it. But you...you still haven't. You likely never will, having seen how you deal with other losses in your life, and that isn't a dig at you, John, it's just a recognition of your personality. So all of this...shopping for a coffin, looking for a resting place, this is performative. It's to ease your pain. Your anguish. Feeling like you're doing everything you can while you can."
Father Krickett bit his lip and nodded slowly. Boris wasn't wrong.
"I don't...I don't want you to die, I mean, yeah," John said, his voice cracking, "nobody wants anyone they care about to die. I've lost my brother, my boyfriend, so many people in my life that mattered to me. I was mad about surviving my car accident too, so I know that feeling all too well. After losing Steven, I closed myself off. I didn't allow myself to become close with anyone again because I knew firsthand the pain that you felt when you inevitably lost them. Until you, Boris. Until I met you. You're the first person I've opened up to in years. And a lot of that was because of how we both viewed the world. But also because I could see in you what I saw in them, what I missed in them, and in some warped way it was like I had them back."
Boris took a long puff on his cigar, then stubbed it out entirely, exhaling smoke into the air and tossing the butt on the ground.
"Yeah, you're not wrong. It's performative. But it isn't just for me. It isn't inherently selfish. I want you to be at peace. To have the best you can. I just wish you didn't have it right now," John said, "I wish..."
John leaned against another headstone and sighed, shaking his head.
"I wish we could've had what others had," John said.
Boris slowly approached and leaned against the headstone beside him.
"What do you mean by that?" Boris asked, "What we've had has been great."
"No, it...it has," John said, "please, don't get me wrong, but...well, we've said this before...if it were different, if you were younger, I were older, if we'd come from the same generation - either yours or mine - we could've had so much more. You admired Polly for being unashamedly out, even when she came from a generation that didn't accept it. She was brave, you acknowledged this. We could've been brave. Priests aren't supposed to fall in love. But I guess some things you can't help."
Boris smiled and put his hand on John's shoulder, causing John to look away.
"You once told me that time takes everything from us. It cannot be reasoned with, it cannot be fought, and it cannot be bargained against. It takes what it takes without compassion, but also without malice. It can't do it with either, because it isn't a living thing, it's a concept. You said memory is the only thing we have in the fight against time, and so long as we remember those we loved - even if they look nothing like we remember - then we've won. You've won. Because the idea of them is what's important. The feeling they imparted on you. Not what they looked like. That's what photographs are for."
John now looked at Boris, as Boris ran his old hand up to the young priests face and touched his cheek. John reached up and held it there.
"So once I'm gone, John," Boris said, "you're in charge of remembering me, okay?"
"Okay," John whispered, tears rolling down his face.
Boris leaned in and kissed him, and John happily kissed him back. It was a moment John had never expected to have, but Boris figured, well, this was the end. May as well give him something to remember him by. Life started to resume in the cemetery, the air began to blow again, and everything sounded more clear, more beautiful. Boris rested his forehead on John's and smiled, making John laugh anxiously. The last thing Boris ever anticipated to find in his old age was a real kind of love, but he was so happy to have met John and allowed himself to be open with him. Sure, to outsiders, it must've looked so strange. An old man and a young priest. But they didn't care. That's what love was. You ignored the strangeness and you embraced the quiet joy of the experience.
"They say the best years of your life are your 20s," Boris said, "but frankly, I'd reckon it's actually these years. The ones at the end."
"And what makes you think that?" John asked.
"You know yourself, fully, and you can be anyone you want without judgement or shame from your peers," Boris said, "if you're brave enough, of course."
"I'd say you're brave enough," John replied, both men laughing.
A pause as they just listened to the sounds of the cemetery around them.
"Hey John," Boris asked.
"Yeah?"
"You want my ashes?" Boris asked.
Another pause.
"Yeah."
***
Sister Jenn was doing some cleaning in John's office, organizing the papers on his desk and washing his windows a little. She usually did this once a week, and he'd never once acknowledged it, but she didn't mind. She didn't do it for him. She did it for the church. While wiping the window down, she heard footsteps enter the room and glanced over her shoulder to see Father Krickett standing there.
"Oh, hello," she said happily.
"Didn't know you did this," John said, "thank you, that's very considerate of you."
"Cleanliness is next to godliness," Sister Jenn said, making John chuckle as he sat at his desk. John sat in his chair, watching Sister Jenn finish her window washing, before she turned to face him and sat on his desk. She pulled her habit off and let her long blonde hair fall around her shoulders.
"What made you join the church, Jennifer?" John asked, and Jenn exhaled.
"That's a big question," she said, "I suppose it came from trying to find reason in a world without any. When you have a life where bad things happen to you, you want answers, reasons why. You can't just accept that this happens. So you turn to religion, which offers you the belief that it happens for a reason, to strengthen you. But then that doesn't exactly sit well with me, because if God loves me, why would he allow these horrible things to happen just to make me stronger? Aren't there easier, less traumatizing ways, to make someone stronger? The whole religion is nothing but contradictions, but I suppose that's where the faith comes in. Blind faith, though, don't like that. Still like questioning."
John smiled, nodding, as he reached down into his cabinet beneath his desk and pulled out a bottle of bourbon and uncorked it, putting two small glasses on the desk and pouring them both a glass. Jenn took it, hesitantly, and downed it in one go while John cautiously sipped on his.
"I hope you're happy, Jenn," John said, "with Whittle, with being you, with...with having the chance to be with the person you want. That's a very rare thing. You deserve to be happy. Not all of us get that."
"I am," Jenn said.
She put the glass back down on the table, hopped down from the desk and adjusted her frock, then told John she had to go for the night and that she'd see him tomorrow. John, now alone in his office, looked towards the stained glass windows in his office, and he turned his glass in his hand absentmindedly. So he would be the recipient of Boris's ashes. In a way, this meant that they would, in some warped way, get to be together forever. John smiled as he lifted his glass to his lips once more.
After all, Jesus did say to love everyone, didn't he?