It is hard to find a small cemetery in Los Angeles. And I was set on my son being buried somewhere small and private, a place where there would be few passers-by, where there would be fewer incurious glances than in some multi-acre necropolis or the vast landscaped death park that is the norm.
I found an old, partially rebuilt mission at the north end of the San Fernando Valley where, by dint of a hefty donation to the restoration fund, I was provided with a plot in one corner, shaded by a grove of eucalyptus trees. I go there from time to time, about once a month, trying not to make a ritual out of my visits, in good moods and bad, but inevitably the place has forged its associations (I have no real memory of him, after all) and now it is the rattle of dry leaves, the tomcat smell of eucalyptus, even the filigreed shadow of sun through branches, that conspire to remind me of my dead son.
I spent some time on the headstone also: what does one inscribe when a life has only spanned sixteen days? “Those whom the Gods love…?” ‘Vanity of vanities, saith the preacher, all is vanity’? In the end I chose white marble, very simple, and had the name and the date inlaid in bronze.
COLMAN BROCKWAY
10 April 1930
26 April 1930
Over the years since his death the verdigris on the bronze lettering has run and stained the marble beneath, like green tears. Green tears for my blue baby. Coleman Brockway came into the world with a stacked deck against him from day one—he had a hole in his heart.