I Thought Talking to Headstones Was A Cheesy TV Trope Until I Tried It Myself
I was estranged from my friend when he died
(Trigger Warning: this story mentions alcohol and drug abuse.)
“Ben* is up the hill past the large bush”
I’m thrown off by the attendant’s usage of the present tense, as though the directions are to a cottage in the woods where Ben awaits my arrival with a cup of tea. It has taken almost two years after Ben’s passing for me to collect the courage to visit his grave. I attended his memorial, but I couldn’t bring myself to go to his burial the day after. Across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco the houses are spread out over the rolling hills, the sunshine warmer and the air fragrant with eucalyptus and dry grass. I don’t know my way around here, or around the hippy cemetery. Past the tall stone walls and through the black metal gate, the walking paths on the expansive property aren’t named. In an effort not to disrupt the natural landscape, headstones are natural or slightly smoothed rocks that cannot go past a certain height. Many grow obscured by vegetation. The small flags used to identify the recent graves for friends and family were removed from Ben’s plot over a year ago. As a result, I find myself lost in the bucolic necropolis.
I’m not sure anything will ever make me cry as much as math from elementary school through high school. I recently saw this tiktok of a homework table re-enactment between a child and their father. The child cries: panting, slurping up their tears, while the father repeats the simple problem over and over again slowly, the same exact way. The child answers the question incorrectly and the exasperated father starts the same song and dance for the umpteenth time. This was how it went when my father helped me with math homework. At my mom’s house, Scotty, the downstairs neighbor helped. A former high school math teacher, Scotty was considerably more patient and qualified. However, he had moved from rural Idaho to be out of the closet and have fun, meet people, go to parties, and live in a city unencumbered by kids who couldn’t solve for x. My mother knew that neither of these de facto tutors were sustainable and turned to Craigslist. In the early 2000’s all San Franciscans went to Craigslist. You could find someone to put together your IKEA furniture, serve drinks at a private party, write your college papers, hook up with, or simply walk around in your apartment for a few hours in their underwear (Craigslist “Personal” was a strange place). That is where my mom found Ben, a mathematics grad student at San Francisco State University looking for pupils so he wouldn’t starve.
I wander, distressed and lost, up and down the golden grass-lined paths on the far side of the cemetery. Bushes and trees are scattered across the hill. My chest tightens. Was the aforementioned “large bush” actually a tree? One step after the other on the dusty path, one stone after the next that doesn’t say his name, and more large pieces of foliage mistaken for Ben’s harbor. My throat burns. Under the clear blue sky, the warm breeze carries faint music from the backyard of a neighbor down the hill, beyond the boundary fences. Life carried on the wind across to death and it was simultaneously eerie and comforting. After craning my neck and looking for Ben’s headstone for over an hour, I become hysterical. Hot tears roll down my cheeks, paired with heaving breaths of grief. My nose runs uncontrollably. Failure — a feeling Ben had helped me approach, grow comfortable with, and eventually overcome in math — now mocks my self-reliance. In an act of desperation, I call the cemetery office on my cell phone even though I’m not sure what kind of clarity I am going to get from the woman who gave me the vague directions. I hadn’t been provided with a map; I don’t think they even give out maps. The attendant answers the phone and can tell I’m upset. She offers to mark the grave with flags so I can visit another day. I try to get clarification about whether the large bush is a tree and exactly how far down the path I’m supposed to go. I had come to the cemetery because I was ready to visit Ben’s grave that afternoon and I refused to give up. I worried that if I went home, unable to find him, I wouldn’t return.
I met Ben for the first time in seventh grade, at my dining room table with my best friend. My friend was convinced he was wearing eyeliner the moment she saw him. Eyeliner or not, I knew from his appearance that we could get along. He was slim, a bit gaunt in the cheeks, extremely pale, and wore his black hair with a swooping bang across his forehead. His dark eyes were reflected by the dark circles underneath. If he had been a cartoon he would have been 50% Emily the Strange and 50% Victor Van Dort from Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride. He wore black, faded black, black velvet, gray, and occasionally a maroon or other rich deep color. As a punk, punk rock, punk pop, alternative music fan and BFD tour attendee, I saw his fashion choices as a signal that we had overlapping music taste. Math tutoring with my best friend didn’t last — I was too easily distracted. One-on-one tutoring was better for my grades, and it allowed Ben and I to bond over Modest Mouse and whatever personal information slipped into the conversation. We were both cynical and sarcastic. He was in a band, loved his mom, and on occasion brought his elderly black dog over to nap on the floor during my session. It was a relief to have someone just as frustrated with my school math teacher’s methods. It helped to know that when I didn’t understand math, I wasn’t at fault, especially with the added setback of ADHD. Some scientists believe ADHD makes math more difficult, although I recently came across a scholarly article positing that because students with ADHD are often less successful in school they become hyper-aware of their struggles and develop anxiety, which is more to blame for hindered math performance, and that confidence is key to better math performance for those with ADHD (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S104160801930144X). Although, it is important to mention individuals with ADHD are at a higher likelihood for having Dyscalculia, a specific learning disorder that makes math incredibly challenging. In my case, math made me anxious and led to melt-downs. Seventh grade math was a punch in the gut; we had started doing algebra and word problems more seriously, and incorporating positive and negative numbers. Ben and I abhorred my math teacher’s lesson on positive and negative numbers, centered around a hot air balloon. In this scenario, a positive number was a “birdie” you tied to the balloon to make it fly higher and a negative number was a “sandbag” which you put on the balloon to bring it lower. Positive numbers were referred to as birdies, negative numbers sandbags, and we were required to use this language to complete equations. It did not work for me — at all. Also, there were so many frustrating flaws with this concept that nagged me, like if you already had the sandbags in the basket they were already pulling you down, and why were we tying birds to hot air balloons when you could just release more gas to fill it up? Ben derived endless satisfaction making jokes about sandbags and birdies.
Sometime shortly after calling the cemetery attendant, turning around on the path, and sobbing more, I find Ben’s grave tucked near a small tree. Not a large bush. I sit down in the grass and fish a small beach rock from my bag. Most of my rocks are from tide pool and agate beaches on the CA and Oregon coast. On those misty beaches, I am at peace, feeling most like myself, and losing track of time until water nips at my ankles. I’m reminded that I am just a little person in this world, with infinite smaller worlds inside it, infinite like the Coastline Paradox of Richardson and Mandelbrot. At the base of sharp rocky cliffs or rolling sand dunes, I study the smallest stones and crabs and take in my surroundings: otters, sea lions, fields of mussels, purple and green sea anemones and jet black spiky sea urchins below the cold salty water. Ben deserves to share this experience, even if it is only symbolic. My thumb runs over the gray stone, rounded and smoothed by the waters with an enchanting hole bored through the center by an industrious clam. I think about where to place it for Ben and recall the Jewish tradition of placing a stone on a grave, a tradition I had subconsciously followed. It feels fitting that a tradition passed down through a familial religion would call me to honor someone I considered family.
Even though Ben studied, taught, and otherwise surrounded himself with mathematics, he couldn’t hold on to money. He was the budget version of the Dark Academia aesthetic, with mild dandruff, beat up Converse, and an addiction to American Spirits. His faded skinny jeans never fit right, tied up around his waist like a crumpled paper bag. We often fed Ben when he came over and on occasion I slipped him a bag of pantry goods. One afternoon I visited Ben’s house for tutoring. As he cobbled together a sad sandwich before our session, he told me how he had decided to use all of his money on a new computer. I asked if he needed the computer for mathematical computations, and he readily acknowledged that he did not. Ben applied his money to his desires as opposed to food and new clothes. For about a year while he was tutoring me in high school, Ben was making a sci-fi movie out in the Death Valley salt flats with his friends. He spent several hundred dollars buying a vintage soviet pilot helmet on Ebay for the main character because he needed to stay true to his artistic vision. To Ben, money was a resource that ebbed and flowed when he needed it to, and savings restricted the present. Sometimes Ben went to Vegas and counted cards for a few thousand dollars, like a much lower stakes version of the movie “21" about the MIT blackjack team. When he was especially broke, he would stop by his local pizza parlor and buy bungled pizzas at a heavily discounted rate. He quit smoking many times to save money, on top of improving his health.
I decide Ben and I need some music and play Big Star from my phone. A small chuckle escapes my mouth as I realize he has finally gotten even with me for the time I made him cry. I hated math so much, because it made me feel stressed and deficient. Math was the last bastion of my academic issues from before I transferred schools in 5th grade. I definitely took my anger out on Ben sometimes. Young teenagers are unsurpassed bullies and I knew how to cut deep. After hitting my limit of frustration one afternoon, I launched into a rant about how useless pursuing math was in the greater scheme of life. Ben couldn’t handle my vitriolic speech so he packed up and left early, and then called my mother crying. Later, my mother sat me down and explained how what I had said might not have seemed to hurtful to me, but that wasn’t the case for Ben. Ben loved math. It was the one and only time I got grounded. Ben had unfathomable compassion; I owed him some tears. As the album plays, I update Ben on my life: my relationship, what I’m doing for work, my writing. There are moments of only music, uncomfortable moments when I wonder if I even deserve to be at the cemetery because we had been out of touch for three years, perhaps Ben hadn’t even considered me a friend anymore when he died. But this self-consciousness is followed by my memory of Ben as a person, his kindness and the gift he gave me at his memorial. The album ends and I play Flight Of The Concords, a comedy music band we bonded over and often quoted to each other. Maybe it is unhinged of me to try to lighten the mood at a grave but I get called weird in perpetuum.
Ben and I wouldn’t have been so close if I hadn’t been so terrible at math. One-on-one I usually saw him twice a week for an hour or more. Ben had much more confidence in my math abilities than I ever did; it was illogical. In retrospect, I believe he wanted me and all of his students to feel the joy and excitement of being enamored with math like himself. During my freshman year of high school Ben taught a pre-calculus class at SF State, and he and my mother decided I would take the college pre-calculus class having not taken advanced geometry or trigonometry. If this sounds absurd, that is because it was; I still don’t understand why they thought I needed to take the class. The pre-calc required me to see Ben twice a week for class, one tutoring session for the pre-calculus class, and one for my regular high school math. We saw each other most days of the week and our friendship grew accordingly. My mom gave him unsolicited relationship advice and hired him to drive her and her friends around Napa when they went wine tasting. Ben and I constantly made fun of each other. He was the older brother I had always wanted and he was extremely present in my life. I knew how to get to his office on campus half-asleep, how to take the bus from my high school to his house, and use his desktop computer to go on Wolfram Alpha. Math was still making me suffer, and I was doing more math than I had ever done before, but I had Ben to help me. My instant panic induced by math began to subside, although I did cry during the pre-calculus final because I was so overwhelmed. I passed the pre-calc class with a low B, because of all of the tutoring and the curved grading system. I still took pre-calc my junior year of high school, and the credits from the SF state class didn’t do anything in college because the lowest math class there was calc 1, nonetheless my fear of math significantly decreased from the exposure.
The sun rolls across the sky and the wind picks up. Leaves, branches, and blades of grass whisper about the impending arrival of the afternoon fog. I stay put in the grass, breathing. Being at his grave comforts me more than I had imagined it would. I loved Ben. After his unexpected death I refused to believe he wouldn’t even be on the fringes of my life anymore. My frustration prevented me from going to the burial itself. But now, Ben felt closer, like he was still present somehow. He would be proud of the person I was trying to become and feel no anger towards me about the way we had become distant. I knew how cheesy it seemed at the time and yet it was honest to my experience. I find a good place for my rock, snap a photo for a personal token, and walk down the hill to my car. I’m ready to return to the real world, but I’ve got a drive through Marin, back across the Golden Gate Bridge, and into North Beach to be with my feelings.
Sophomore year of high school myself and a handful of other students were moved out of the honors math and into the regular class. After less than a week in the regular class, I wanted to pull out my own hair from boredom. Maybe before Ben this easy class would have been a blessing, but besides being sour about getting demoted, I found myself still wanting to be challenged. My confidence in my own math abilities was a direct result of working with Ben. I lobbied my high school to start a middle track math class. The nine or so of us got the class and my favorite biology professor agreed to be the instructor. Much like the aforementioned study suggesting that when students with ADHD become confident in their math skills they are more successful with math, I went out of my way to be more challenged by math when I finally felt competent. Soon I needed Ben less and less. We shifted to SAT math tutoring. Then I went off to college.
On the road, I feel okay. Despite the relief from visiting his grave, I wished we could actually talk. With every year that passes, my respect for Ben’s determination to do the things he loved grows. There was a ton of stuff I wanted Ben’s input about that I couldn’t get anymore. Even though he had loved and pursued math, Ben had also loved and pursued art. He had bands, made movies and solo music. As a recent college grad with a passion for writing fiction, I desperately wanted Ben’s advice and encouragement about chasing success in art. Even if his opinion would be that pursuing art was as painful and illusive as it seemed to me so far, I would have welcomed the camaraderie. I also wanted to talk about his mother’s death and how it had affected him. I remember it put him in a very dark place. He missed tutoring sessions or appeared exhausted, bleary-eyed, and bedraggled. I wanted to know what had helped Ben feel better about his mother’s passing, so I could provide similar support to my long-term partner whose mother was fighting an incurable degenerative neurological disorder. In an unfortunately depressing coincidence, my partner’s mother had also selected the same hippy cemetery as her final resting place. My return to the cemetery was inevitable, but at the time still unknown, and Ben was there to give me council but incapable. In all honesty, it made me angry.
Ben passed away in the fall of 2016, a little more than a year after my college graduation. When my mother and I got word of his passing, she reached out to his older brother through Facebook. If Ben was a Tim Burton character, his brother was in a California version of King Of The Hill: a robust blonde car mechanic living in the Central Valley. They loved each other but were incredibly different. Ben’s brother said the death was accidental, related to a recreational drug habit. My mother lamented that alcohol and weed hadn’t been enough to cushion Ben’s strife. It was an insensitive response, especially considering the indiscriminate nature of addiction, though I understood her logic. Perhaps Ben would have lived longer if he had engaged in a less immediately dangerous form of self-medication. She knew addiction didn’t work that way but was aggrieved and trying to fix what had already come to pass. At first, I was shocked by the details surrounding Ben’s death. Then the pieces started coming together as I reflected on the last few years. He was recently engaged to his girlfriend, had moved into a gorgeous apartment, and his band was starting to get more popular. He was a doctor of math! From those facts alone, Ben’s life appeared to be going well, but there was so much more happening below the surface that I had experienced firsthand.
Ben and I hadn’t been in contact at all since my 21st birthday party in 2013. In truth, I had been avoiding him, though he hadn’t reached out to me either. At my party he was sloppily drunk, unable to stand or balance, a rag-doll of a person. He dragged himself over to gift me a bottle of Kraken whiskey and then exclaimed that he was now an alcoholic like his “deadbeat” father. I did not know how to respond, but I did know that he didn’t mention his absent father when he was happy. Ben had only resentment and hatred towards his father. During one of our early tutoring sessions he mentioned that his conception was unintended; he considered himself an “accident.” I tried to lighten the mood by indicating that without his father’s contributions, he wouldn’t be alive and the cool person he was today. Ben saw his own origin unfavorably, like his father had forced a burden on his mother. This forced burden extended to Ben having to exist in this world as well, though Ben didn’t explicitly say as much. For the rest of the party his future fiancée wrangled him. I felt terrible for her. If that was the only thing, I may have reached out sooner, but Ben had also become unhinged on social media.
Early in college I noticed Ben posting erratic Facebook updates. My timeline flooded with his incomprehensible musings: each one attributed to himself and signed with his initials, as though he were a quotable philosopher. They were funny at times, but mostly sad and disturbed. His presence on social media shifted again as Ben grabbed a hold of militant veganism, posting endless videos of violent and graphic factory farming and animal slaughter. In addition to these unsettling posts on his own page, he regularly sent me Facebook event invitations for quitting Facebook en masse, which struck me as uncomfortably paradoxical. Surely he knew making a Facebook event to quit Facebook was bizarre? I was in college, in a different state, trying to balance my own life and mental health struggles, so I decided to reach out to him in the future. And I did. I sent Ben a paper invitation to my college graduation spring 2015, hoping it might be a way for us to reconnect. I didn’t hear back. I don’t feel like I could have saved him from dying through my friendship or some self-important bullshit. Most of all, I regret the conversations we didn’t get to have.
Ben’s memorial was heartbreaking and beautiful. It was significantly more powerful than a clergy person commentating on an assorted list of good qualities and good deeds collected from a short meeting with the deceased's loved ones. Ben’s fiancée, an artist, found a space in the Mission District and created an instillation with his belongings. Dusty bookshelves, music equipment, and other knick-knacks graced the cavernous room. Each item had a gallery style label. There were things I recognized and things I did not, such as a small glass cloche Ben used to remove spiders from his apartment without killing them. There was a station dedicated to a polar bear he sponsored, and colorful ceramic caricatures of him and his old dog made by his fiancée. I put on headphones at an interactive station and listened to a rough recording of him and his band, including an interjection of Ben groaning and laughing about how his vocals were too melancholy for his own love song. The room smelled like him: cigarettes, cheap soap, and musty books. We were invited to use a typewriter to write something for or about him. There were also printed out Rate My Professor questionnaires where we were encouraged to feed Ben’s ego about being a stellar educator and also a hot prof by coloring in all the chili peppers. Heartfelt messages would be joined by those reviews and strewn across his casket like roses. The memorial was poignant, funny, and an irrefutable reflection of how much his fiancée loved and understood him.
I found his fiancée to give her my condolences, and compliment her on her art and the instillation itself. My name sounded familiar to her. We talked a little about Ben’s dog and she mentioned that Ben had gone as far as to keep the dog in diapers until it was way past his time. That sounded about right to me. Perpetually uncomfortable with eye-contact, I looked over at a stack of papers next to her and saw a familiar shiny cobalt line. I asked her if that was my graduation invitation. She fished it out of the stack, handed it to me, and suggested I keep it. Then she remembered who I was, because Ben had seriously considered going to my graduation even all the way out in the middle of nowhere Washington. I said I didn’t actually expect him to go because getting there was kind of expensive, but I wanted him to know that he had helped me achieve that milestone. Around the room were dozens of people who loved and cared about him, and a little girl with her mom, one of his tutoring students, there to say goodbye.
*Ben is a pseudonym. His accidental death was not public knowledge and the people closest to him decided not to share that information. I chose the name Ben because of Ben Gibbard the lead singer for Death Cab for Cutie, one of his favorite “sad boy” bands. I’d put on my best raspy alt. singer voice and croon “I will follow you into the dark!” The irony is not lost on me.
