Bedrock

In an essay from the LARB Quarterly issue no. 43, “Fixation,” Charley Burlock navigates gravesites, literal and figurative.

By Charley BurlockDecember 21, 2024

• LARB Lit

• Memoir & Essay

This essay is a preview of the LARB Quarterly, no. 43: Fixation. Become a member for more fiction, essays, criticism, poetry, and art from this issue—plus the next four issues of the Quarterly in print.

¤

We have become accustomed to figures disappearing from our landscape. Does this not lead us to interrogate the landscape?
—Richard Rodriguez, “Late Victorians”

YOU CAN’T BURY your dead in San Francisco. In 1900, all new internments were banned within city limits. By the next decade, the land was too valuable for corpses. All existing cemeteries were evicted, the bodies dug up and sent 13 miles south to the town of Colma, where the dead population now outnumbers the living 1,000 to one. Most of the bodies ended up in mass graves. Private reburial cost a premium. The tombstones that were recoverable after the massive dig, and which families did not repurchase from the city, were ground and used in public works. They now line rain gutters in Buena Vista Park, make up the breakwater in the Marina, and are used for erosion barriers at Ocean Beach.

Every few years, the land tries to shudder itself free from the city. I’ve felt dozens of these trembles, all of them weak, the seven major fault lines that cut across San Francisco grinding against each other, mindlessly and mildly, like teeth in the night. But seismologists and street-corner doomsayers alike agree: the Big One is coming. Those who survive the initial quake will face tsunamis, landslides, flooding, and fires. Thousands will die. Skylines will crumble. Warning shots of this inevitable destruction punctuate our days yet rarely wreak too much havoc because of the city’s generally well-planned disaster infrastructure, much of it repurposed from the tombstones’ marble. These hand-me-down headstones are our defense against the unquiet and highly marketable land we uprooted them from. My city is nothing if not resourceful.

Both the house I grew up in and the house my mother lives in now are built on top of these evacuated gravesites. Our neighbors uncovered fragments of headstones while planting fresh rosemary—Born, Mrs., Died, Erected, and Catheri fully legible within the marble shards. I don’t know what they did with the pieces, but their garden is still growing, healthy and pruned.

I do not live in San Francisco anymore and the last time I did was by accident. I left the city for college and returned in March 2020 to shelter in place and, so it turned out, to scatter my brother’s ashes. He had been dead six years by then and it was time. It would never be time.

¤

Ben always felt mythic to me. He was six foot four but seemed taller. He was handsome and acted handsomer. He was never alone if he could help it. He could always help it. People stuck to him like flypaper, and he, inexplicably, stuck to me, inviting me to tag along to parties and smoke sessions and night walks with friends who were confused by my presence—that of a girl three years younger, freckle-faced and contagiously anxious. Ben did not seem to notice, bragging, loudly, that I was his “mini-me,” telling the older boys I could hang. He insisted that we thought alike and acted identically. I aped him until it was true.

The long delay in spreading his ashes was logistical as well as emotional. Grief is many things, one of which is inconvenient. Ben died when I was 17 and he was 20. For a couple of years, his remains played a morbid game of musical chairs between the basements and attics of relatives. When, finally, they settled into my mother’s reluctant possession, I was already 3,000 miles away at college, returning only for extended school breaks during which I was deliberately hard to pin down. My mother was eager to get the ashes out of her closet. I was eager to keep them there: contained and out of view. I did not have time to tend to expired grief. The loss had overstayed its sympathy but not its ability to shred my intestines to ribbons if provoked.

It was provoked often, especially in San Francisco. I never stayed in the city long. I missed it constantly.

¤

The West—San Francisco specifically—is often described as a place to run away to. It’s imagined as a land without history, rootless and fluid and free from the kinds of legacies that throttle so much of the rest of the country, the rest of the world. It’s the red horizon at the end of an old Western and the sparkle of gold in a dark, aluminum pan.

The 1960s cemented San Francisco’s reputation as an asylum for the restless and flighty. Hordes of teenagers fled their neat, square homes, coaxed out and into the city by the cries of Janis Joplin and Jim Jones. It’s hard to imagine those flower children growing up. Many of them didn’t. Some of them did and they are old now, returned to their neat, square homes where they went on to raise children or write books that lured others to a party that had already ended. Others are still alive and in the same place. In high school, we paid them to buy us fifths of Royal Gate and strawberry Swishers. One woman with arms like spruce roots and small teeth told us that she remembered it all, that she cried for 18 hours in the rain, that she knew the names of people sacrificed—sacrificed in this church basement right here, still standing, still bringing in worshippers who had no idea—that all of the bands sounded the same and that she missed them and that she had seen bodies hanging limp over the cypress branches of Golden Gate Park. I don’t know if there were ever bodies in those trees, but I know that she saw them. I could see their outlines rippling in her pupils.

From a safe distance, I loved telling stories about San Francisco to people who didn’t know it. With words, I animated a place I didn’t always myself remember. Like every beloved city, San Francisco has been dying as long as it’s been alive. Compared to most other beloved cities, however, San Francisco hasn’t been living all that long. It’s easy to mythologize the young—perhaps because the less time a person or a place has existed, the less evidence they have accumulated to contradict the stories we’d like to tell. San Francisco has only been San Francisco, in name and reputation, for a few generations. The loss of each version of the city feels profound; there have been so few. Always, the young are mourned diligently.

On New Year’s Day, a few years before the pandemic hit, my mother caught my 19-year-old elbow as I returned home in the morning, my legs scored red from sleeping in fishnets, glitter matted into my hairline. She told me, brightly, that she had an idea. Grab the plastic scoop from the oatmeal bin and meet me in the car.

The date was auspicious. I was home. I was never home. It would only take an afternoon, and I wouldn’t need to change—what I had on was fine.

That morning, I slipped out of my responsibility with excuses I had used before and would use again. I was not ready. It was a holiday; there would be crowds everywhere. And, as always, I needed more warning. I needed more privacy. I needed more time.

Four years later, I was ejected from my East Coast liberal arts school with nowhere to go but home and nothing to do but wear a mask, keep my distance, and wait. Seated on a SFO–bound plane, I realized that privacy and time would likely never be more abundant, and as we took off, it occurred to me what would be waiting when I landed. I watched New England’s winter melt beneath the wings—tidy, black-and-white networks of little farms and roads made increasingly illegible by distance—and knew I was screwed. I sanitized my hands. I missed my brother.

¤

I found out that Ben was in the hospital over Facebook. I was attending a high school arts program a couple of hours outside the city. He was a sophomore at Tulane. I woke up to a message from one of Ben’s friends who had been trying to contact my parents, through me, at three in the morning.

By the time I was awake, it was nine and my uncle was already speeding down I-80 to retrieve me. My parents were both in the air.

¤

My mother picked me up at the airport on the Ides of March, 2020—Lysol on the dashboard, two clementines and a can of seltzer rolling in the passenger seat. As we braided our way around Teslas and Priuses on tottering streets, I watched San Francisco appear in the windshield as it never did in my memory: a city of Walgreens, parking meters, rain gutters.

When I imagine my city from a distance, I conjure a space that is not walkable. The San Francisco in my mind is constructed not of continuous pavement but of isolated images. Some of these are sourced from memory yet oversaturated and harshly filtered—appearing more like stills from a film than from my own past. Other images are film stills, or sketched secondhand from the anecdotes of relatives, or from the lyrics of songs. All appear equally gorgeous and equally flat, as though trapped under the same museum glass.

Driving with my mother over the impossibly sloped pavement, I felt ashamed for turning my city into a collection: highly stylized, overloved, and artfully posed. The ducks hanging by their necks in the window of Wing Lee Bakery do not glisten like caramel—they glisten like ducks.

In March 2020, the city before my eyes stopped being “San Francisco” and started being home: a fragile, tender, inarticulate thing. A nesting of griefs, too big and too small to name.

¤

I began grieving Ben before I knew he was dead—which is to say, I started fracturing my brother into a collection of pieces even when he still inhabited a whole body. Cows and vineyards blurred beyond car windows while my uncle and I drove to SFO. I flipped through photos on my iPhone. When I arrived in the ICU and pulled back the curtain, I was shocked by the boy in the bed. Not by the tubes or the gauze but by (despite these) how much he looked like Ben, my brother, and how little he looked like the composite boy I’d been building in my brain from my most cinematic memories and glossy Christmas-card shots. Before me was a human being: complete, imperfect, and intimately known. Knowing surgery couldn’t save him, my mother had refused to let the doctors shave Ben’s head. His lip protruded stupidly, the way it never did when he posed for photos but always did when he was deep in concentration or sleep.

I knew I would need to remember him like this—close-up, alive—but didn’t know yet that I wouldn’t be able to. One of grief’s many brutalities is that it can force even the sanest and most literal among us to become desperate mythologists of our own lost pasts. “A child dies twice,” my mother often tells me, “once when he breathes his last breath and again when his name is spoken for the last time.” My mother tells me she got the quote from one of the many “death and dying” books that, for years, have piled atop her desk, around her bedroom, in the space beneath the bathroom sink. The internet tells me she got it from Banksy and that she got it wrong: you die twice, not your child. But I like my mother’s version better: it has higher stakes. It’s only the living who care when the dead are forgotten. It’s our responsibility to keep that second death at bay, to extend our loved one’s memory beyond the places and people they encountered in life. It requires brilliant stories to fill the mouths of strangers with the names of our beloved dead. It requires embellishments, omissions, lies.

¤

My belongings had been carefully boxed in my absence, moved out of my room and into the garage. My mother apologized frantically for this as she helped me heave my duffel bag up the front stairs in March 2020—she had not known, she kept repeating, that I would be back.

Deep in piles of outgrown jean jackets and souvenir piggy banks, I found a Williams Sonoma peppermint-bark tin full of condolence cards, all unopened. It was my first day of lockdown and I sat on the floor in pajamas in the late morning, reading them all, back-to-back. My mother made poached eggs. I refilled my shelves and hangers.

¤

We never considered burying Ben. I say “we”; I shouldn’t. My parents signed all the papers, made all the decisions, and—when they divorced less than a year after his death—divided the ashes evenly between them. When my father returned to his home state of Maine, I assume he brought his half with him, though I am not sure. We speak frequently and openly, but the question is hard to ask.

I do know that we—my mother and I—were wary of putting too much of him in any one place. We discussed it, after she first received the impossibly small box; though we liked the idea of dumping all his remains in the planter of one of his favorite restaurants, we didn’t like the idea of a physical location that we would need to navigate around the way we do the hard and immutable dates of his birth, the beginning of his death, and, two days later, the end: March 27, November 8, November 9, November 10. We didn’t want a gravesite.

Two weeks into lockdown, I began going on long walks, aimless but determinedly fast. Powering through the Presidio one afternoon, I came up against a wall of hard, white stone. Its blankness is obsessively and furiously maintained, a mosaic of alternately sun-bleached patches of the same shade of institutional paint. Underneath are layers of nicknames, confessions, insults, initials, and declarations of love. One of these layers, as I then recalled with a contraction of shame, is my own.

In advance of the 2016 Super Bowl and in response to quality-of-life complaints, the mayor at the time, Ed Lee, installed a municipal “fix-it director” to oversee a team of 40 city employees. The idea was simple: disgruntled residents could take smartphone photos of human feces and etchings of “die yuppie scum,” and fix-it team members would arrive in a matter of hours to do what their titles promised. The data collected from these reports helped the city turn disparate and anonymous tags into civil cases, and civil cases into examples. In February 2016, the city of San Francisco billed Cozy Terry $217,831.64 in damages, penalties, and legal fees for branding the city over two dozen times with variations on her first name. Later that same month, I left my first and only intentional mark on the city: my brother’s full, legal name and death date, four feet tall and in the untrainable child’s scrawl he and I shared.

I didn’t know that I was writing it until I was done, and I didn’t know I was embarrassed until I saw the regret in the eyes of the skater boy who had handed me the can. The memory of that night still pulls at my intestines with a peculiar, hope-tinged shame—shame at the unruly baldness of my grief, hope that what it left behind had witnesses. I hope that strangers saw those letters and internalized their anonymous shapes, their contours and heft; that, like me, they carried those letters for a while even if they didn’t know the extent of their weight. A crueler part of me hopes that someone saw them and, recognizing my brother’s name and handwriting, the neatness of their world trembled for even an instant before the team came along to fix it.

¤

San Francisco’s land itself seems to reject the formation of roots. Millennium Tower, the tallest residential building in the city, is currently leaning 14 inches northwest due to what I’ve seen formally referred to as the “sinking and tilting problem.” On news programs, owners of the multimillion-dollar apartments place marbles in the middle of their hardwood floors and watch with closed mouths as they roll steadily into the wall. Apparently, the issue lies with the foundation: the building’s 58 floors balance atop a soup of young bay mud and packed sand from the Colma Formation. In other words, it isn’t anchored to bedrock.

Millennium Partners (and most every San Franciscan with any sort of grievance to voice) says Salesforce is to blame for the problem. The latter’s own tower, unveiled in 2018, sits just 300 feet away from the Millennium and dwarfs the rest of the skyline. When measured floor-to-ceiling, Salesforce Tower is the tallest building west of the Mississippi. Its enormity, so the argument goes, compromised the integrity of the very land upon which it rests, sinking and tilting the earth itself and threatening to topple everything around it. I want to believe this. Still, I know that, if the skyline was really secure, one building, even one exceptionally, unnecessarily big building, couldn’t have threatened all the rest. I know that the foundation was shot from the start.

Perhaps the best way to stake a claim on San Francisco is not with a stake at all. The land seems too shallow and fluid to build—or bury—anything you want to last. Perhaps we endure in this landscape not through rooting into the earth but through accumulating over its surface. Spreading ourselves thin.

¤

It wasn’t until I left home that I learned to introduce my brother and his death in the same breath. San Francisco is a small city; what roots do manage to grow here inevitably tangle. Everyone I knew in San Francisco had known Ben—or at least had known of Ben, understood he’d been a person before he became a tragedy. When I left the city my brother and I once shared, I learned that death inevitably obscures the details of faces and hands, or else makes them gigantic and far too beautiful. I wanted to bring him down to size, stories that would tally toward the humanity of Ben rather than towards the enormity of a funny, promising 20-year-old’s loss. Over time, I realized that I didn’t have any of these stories left to tell. The clean shells of narrative I had picked over so many times—for my eulogy, for his obituaries, and for those meandering conversations when I, suddenly terrified and intensely awake, found myself falling in love with someone who never met and so could never love Ben—began to feel eerily vacant.

In the face of his death, I scrambled to collect all of the pieces of my brother that I could carry. Those I ended up with I loved recklessly. I held them too closely, recounted them too often. Time and repetition have done to these moments what the bay does to glass: worried down their sharp edges and left them lovely and impotent. Several years out, the shards are too smooth to puzzle back together; they cannot convincingly reconstruct, much less hold together, their source. My brother is gigantic and beautiful to me too, and I hate this gigantic and beautiful boy for taking the place of my favorite person.

¤

Sometimes, I am terrified that the only story I can tell about Ben that is actually about Ben is this one: Ben leaned too far over the railing of his sophomore dorm building, landed on his head, and eventually died.

¤

Over time, my walks got longer. One stretched 14 miles, twice the length of the city in any direction. I went mostly in circles. I passed the neon-lit shops where Ben and I exchanged the profits of our baby teeth for Usagi Yojimbo comics and Big League Chew. I passed the bus stop enclosures where we warmed our fog-bitten faces over Styrofoam boxes of dim sum and streaked excess finger grease onto the folding plastic seats. I passed places where I remembered nothing except secondhand stories gifted by friends, family. Occasionally, I passed places that, thanks to some rare tide, washed back fresh, yet-uncollected memories of Ben, their edges unworn and sharp enough to cut. On those walks, the entire city was a gravesite. I’m still grateful.

Eventually, my mother joined me in my wandering. Walking with her, the borders of the city felt tighter. My mother had lived in San Francisco all her life. From an early age, her life was marked by death; her own mother died when she was 17 and then her son and sister too—a sister who was also her best friend. This small city is crowded with my mother’s ghosts. I get claustrophobic walking by her side, along streets where she used to live with people who are no longer alive. I tell her to leave, start fresh. She tells me to come home.

Walking, my mother insisted on smelling every flower. I insisted that they were full of germs. She did not laugh but squeezed my hand and then smelled them anyway. Where grief has made me shrewd and ambitious, it has made my mother earnest and bold. She spends hours collecting heart-shaped rocks at the beach with a raw enthusiasm that makes me terrified for her. In moments like these, she seems too soft, too ardent for the world. Then I remember that it’s the world’s roughness that made her this way—scored yet strong, like the wood of a blackened dock after years of salt and wind and pummeling waves.

Walking, my mother and I made our way through the Presidio to the bench that bears Ben’s name and an inscription: “I thoroughly enjoy keeping it real.” My mother told me that she came there often, that once she found a key card from a Las Vegas casino. Once, she found a joint. Then, as now, heart-shaped rocks crowded around the plaque. Most, but not all, of them come from her own collection. Often, she sees little kids playing with the offerings and park rangers filling black plastic bags. She doesn’t mind. She always has more to leave behind.

¤

That spring, certain views in certain lights made my mother stop. She’d close her eyes, hold her breath before carrying on. I found myself doing the same. That spring, together, we hit bedrock.

We spread the ashes on his birthday. Though we were locked down in the same home, a room apart at any given time, my mother texted me to suggest the idea. March 27, Ben’s 26th birthday might be a good day to consider scattering …

I composed a tentative list of places we wanted to hit on what I was referring to as “Ben’s Birthday Apocalypse Ash Spreading Tour.” My mother found the title only slightly funny. It began at Mount Sutro, which is not a mountain but a forested exaggeration. Mount Sutro is a hill, a 900-foot blue-green blister of eucalyptus, named for the man who, at one point, owned 10 percent of the city and enough imported seeds to transform the landscape irrevocably.

Before we set out, my mother made her own box to hold the temporary urn provided by the crematorium: a shoebox, plastered with carefully collaged photos. Ben at 11, with spiked green hair. Ben at 15, boxers puffed over the lip of his skinny jeans, a fake diamond glinting in his left ear. Ben as a toddler. In each, he was smiling. He was also pixelated. The pictures had been spat out of my mother’s mobile printer that morning while I slept. Looking at the box, I imagined the scene: my mother’s face lit by her computer screen as she dragged each image to a Word document, the sun rising as she trimmed their edges and carefully applied the glue. The box sat on my lap as we cut across the city. On the lid, my mother had pasted a photo of Ben and me on the last day the two of us spent together. In it, we’re posing in front of the sign for my new art program—although posing is a funny word. It’s clear that my mother wanted the picture and we didn’t. We both look startled and goofy, captured in mid-step and carrying sweating iced coffees.

Ben and I didn’t look much alike. It’s strange to say but impossible to ignore: he was always plainly more beautiful than I was. But we insisted on our total equality—no secrets, no distance between us. When we inevitably spoke in unison or discovered yet another bizarre, private tic we shared, we would throw our heads back, flash our hands in and out of fists, and cry, “We’re the same person!” in a communal gurgle that fell somewhere between Kermit the Frog and Gollum. I cannot remember now where this ritual began, but I remember repeating it often.

Only after he died did I learn that Ben knew about my parents’ impending divorce and hadn’t told me. He wanted to protect me, believed he could fix it. I was more hurt by this omission than by the divorce itself. He’d been three years older than me for the entirety of my life, but where his life stopped, mine kept going. I was 23 when I sat in my mother’s passenger seat, my brother in my lap, smiling and 20, our age difference perfectly eclipsed. For the first time, he looked to me how I must have always looked to him: young.

As we neared the peak, I began to understand why Sutro was called a mountain. The city grew miniature and illegible as we drove up its winding road. I could obscure both Salesforce and Millennium Tower with a single finger. The cypresses of Golden Gate Park and the rain gutters of Buena Vista and the erosion barriers of Ocean Beach were all invisible from that height, but they were all there, contributing, materially but indistinguishably, to the view: anonymous shards of texture and color, pieces of a whole that, at such a distance, didn’t look like pieces at all.

We parked the car and wrestled our way, on foot, to the highest point of the highest point, a sandy mound with balding grass and a panoramic view of the city that was hard to see through the smarting wind. My mother left the shoebox in the car. We would burn it later that evening, at sunset, by the sea. We nodded guiltily at joggers in face masks enjoying the pristine day as their eyes fell on our black box and red eyes. We quietly agreed that this was the place, that we wouldn’t need the plastic scoop after all—that we were emptying it all right there. My mother pried open the box and I watched as its contents puffed into the wind and carried like snow over the winterless city.

¤

Photos courtesy of author.