Myrtle
Olivia Clare Friedman
Never had my mother wanted to live so much as when she was dying. What she made me promise was that she wouldn’t be cremated, that she would be buried with a gravestone in our own yard.
“If I can’t be in a cemetery,” she said, “the yard’s the one place I want to be.”
I told her I would do everything I could.
She said, “I mean it. Complete the circle.”
Just as she died within it, she’d been born in our house. My grandmother was in labor on the living room floor, …