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Today, I am visiting the Phillpotts, and the Shellys, but mostly, I am visiting the Mustacchia family. I've never met these people, and we'll never share a pot of tea. But we're together now, if only for a few minutes.

It's a beautiful April morning in New Orleans. I am in a graveyard walking amongst the dead. It's not a morbid experience. Hardly. The sun is beaming in a near-cloudless sky, motorcycles roar down a nearby street, car horns blare off to my right. There's an odd hum on the breeze.

I am perched on a white marble gravestone; it was once slickly smooth but now it's got a rough sugared-texture from the corrosive action of hydrochloric acid in the atmosphere. I am in one of New Orleans massive above-ground graveyards; this is St. Patrick Cemetery Number Two. It's not as old as the city's St. Louis cemeteries, but it has an infectious ambience, too.

The Mustacchias, the Philpotts, and the Shellys are complete strangers to me, but there is such a wonderful history engraved on their family tombstones, that I begin to feel I know them, if only just a little. There's "Husband of" and "Wife of" and "Mustacchia Infant." There's no name for the deceased baby; it just says, "Infant."

I notice the baby died about a year before I was born, October 5, 1954. I wonder if he or she had lived, how they would have changed the world. Would he (I've now decided the infant was a boy) have been a great architect, a poet, a beloved father, an inspired teacher, a bum? Would we have been friends?

My eyes rove the etchings, and then it hits me: just above the baby boy's entry is engraved, "Bertha C. Gould, wife of Joseph Mustacchia Sr., born Feb 10, 1909 - died Sept 22, 1954." Could she have been the baby's mother? Did she die in childbirth? Did the baby die two short weeks later? I will never know. Who are these people? Someone knows them, and still cares about them. Faded silk chrysanthemums fill three heavy stone vases seated at the sides of the tomb.

I step back, and study the family vault; its side walls are grayed and cracked. I look up. It appears as though some souvenir-hunter has stolen the ornament which once topped the tomb - a cross perhaps? Tiny sprigs of greenery and feathery ferns push their way out of dark cracks - nothing stops life, I think, not even death. But I can slow my life for a moment, to wonder about those who lived and died before me.

A peace passes over me like the silken hand of an angel. Perhaps someday, someone will do the same for me. Pause, I mean, and reflect, if only for a moment or two, on a glorious sunny April morning, and speculate as to who I was, and who loved me. I hear the Canal Street trolley rattle to its end-of-the-line stop.

I bid my new friends a fond farewell. I can't promise I will visit again, so I don't. I look towards the fence and the streetcar beyond. I check my watch. I trail my fingers along the word, "Infant." Then I turn and run, because even in this city of the dead, life prevails.

Learn more about this author, Sheree Zielke.
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