By Costasiella Kuro

I remember the Sundays when my father took me to the cemetery, three stops away by metro. Even on the coldest mornings, when the wind found its way through our coats, we went. My father held my hand as we walked from the station.

We had been going to the cemetery since my mother died. At first, we went for her. After some time, we went simply because it was Sunday.

My father worked almost all the time, and even when he was not working, he was thinking about the work that remained. But at the cemetery, my father’s face was softer. His voice, too, seemed somehow different. He could sit beside my mother’s grave and leave everything else behind for a little while.

I was too young when my mother died to remember her properly. What I remember is the grave, the flowers, and my father’s hand in mine. Sometimes I think that was how I came to know her: through the place where he continued to remember her.

On my father’s insistence, we left things on other people’s graves. We chose the ones without flowers, where no one seemed to come anymore. Some were things we found in the cemetery: a feather, a smooth stone, a fallen leaf, a seedpod. He took me to a second-hand shop on the way, where we searched for something small enough for me to carry. A little porcelain figure. A button. A glass bead. Once, we found a tiny horse with one ear missing. I remember thinking it was perfect.

I liked this part very much. I would hold the object in my hand as we walked, looking for the right grave. When I found one, my father would wait while I placed it carefully on the stone. For a while, someone had remembered them.

I liked the cemetery more than I liked most places. I never grew tired of being there. Its paths climbed the hillside and disappeared around walls. Sometimes we followed one until it became a staircase. We climbed the stairs and found ourselves in another part of the cemetery, higher than the one below. From there, a tomb might look like a small mausoleum. But from the path below, it could be only a wall with several doors in it. The cemetery seemed to have many levels, although I never knew exactly how they connected.

White statues stood among the huge trees. Their faces had darkened with age, and some had lost a nose or a finger. A few leaned to one side, as though they had been thinking about something for a very long time, or perhaps listening to something beneath the earth. As a child, I believed they were alive. They simply waited until I was not watching before they moved.

Columns and arches stood between the graves, covered in ivy. Roots had found their way into the cracks in the stone.

There was always something growing somewhere. Ferns spread through the damp corners beneath the trees, their fronds pushing out between stones and fallen leaves. Moss crept over the edges of graves and softened the carved letters. Small flowers appeared in the grass and between the stones. Bees moved slowly from one cluster to another. Beetles vanished beneath leaves when we came near. Spiders stretched their webs between the iron railings, sometimes so fine that I did not notice them until they caught the light.

And there were cats, so many cats. My father said they lived there. I often saw them sleeping on the walls or stretched out on top of gravestones in the sun. I thought they were guarding the dead. Once I saw a calico cat carrying something in her mouth. She walked carefully through the grass between the graves and disappeared behind a wall. My father said she probably had kittens somewhere.

I remember being surprised by how much life there was. Death was all around us, yet I had never seen so much life in one place.

My father knew the names of many of the plants and birds, and as we wandered through the cemetery, he taught them to me. In his worn-out satchel, he carried a little black-covered sketchbook and drew whatever caught his attention. Sometimes he sat beneath a tree and drew for a long time. Sometimes he walked ahead of me, whistling. Sometimes he fell asleep while I wandered through the cemetery on my own.

I explored the paths, the walls, the old buildings and the places where the grass had grown too high. I began keeping my own notebook. My father wanted me to draw, but I liked writing things down better.

Our Sundays were unlike those of the other families I knew. My father could not afford holidays. At school, I was bullied for not having a mother and for coming from a family that did not have much money. I did not tell him everything, but I think he knew.

If only I had understood then that the cemetery was enough for me. Instead, I often threw tantrums and complained about having to go. I must have made my father sad. He never shouted at me, but he would simply become quiet, and after a while we would not say a word to each other.

On the way home, when the sun had begun to sink, he sometimes carried me on his back if I was too tired to walk. We stopped at a street vendor and he bought a warm bun and a glass bottle of fizzy drink. I remember the warmth of the bun, the bottle in my hand, my father’s shirt against my cheek.

The cemetery stood on an island. People said that one day the island would disappear beneath the water. My father wanted to record the place before that happened. So we began keeping notes and drawings of everything we noticed there.

Eventually, there were so many notes and drawings that my father decided to make them into a book. He would use his illustrations and I would provide the journal entries. We dedicated the book to my mother.

After my father died, I continued going there every Sunday. The cemetery was still there, but it had changed in ways that were difficult to notice at first. A path I remembered as wide had become narrow with grass. The old steps felt smaller beneath my feet. Branches reached across paths that had once been open.

Sometimes I came upon a place I remembered and found that I could no longer see it in quite the same way. I was the one who had changed. I was always aware of the space beside me where my father should have been.

I placed the finished book, which my father had never had the chance to see, on my parents’ graves.

I’m writing in the hours left over from ordinary life. I write because I seem to have things to write, though I’m not always sure what they are. Some of what I write is strange, and not everything makes sense. I hope you won’t mind. Read more here.