Cover Story
photo: Susan Adcock
It was the first cold snap of the season when they buried Steve Grady in Hills of Calvary Memorial Gardens. They hadn’t started digging his grave when we got there. The gentleman who oversees such things came over and apologized to me for the delay. I told him it wasn’t necessary to apologize and that I wanted to be there. Some of his friends had come, to pay their respects. His brother and sister, whom he’d only recently contacted after almost 10 years, drove in that morning from Memphis.
Steve and I had discussed his impending death many times. He suffered from a number of ailments, all aggravated by homelessness and alcohol. Even if he could’ve shaken the alcohol, it was just a matter of time and we both knew it.
“Just bury me up there at Boot Hill,” he’d say. “Everybody I know is already up there.”
Boot Hill is Bordeaux Cemetery, where Metro Social Services was known to provide a burial at no cost to Nashville’s most impoverished citizens. I once asked him if he wanted to take a ride up there and look around.
“No,” he said after a few moments. “I’ll get there soon enough.”
So after 11 months of slogging through the system, trying to get him help that never came, I got to make the call after he died under an interstate bridge. It was the week before Thanksgiving, Homelessness Awareness Week. A detective on the scene had been kind enough to show me a photo of him on the back of a digital camera. Because we weren’t related, that was the last time I would ever see him.
In our first conversation, the voice on the other end of the line explained that Steve would be interred at either Bordeaux Cemetery or Hills of Calvary. There would be no funeral and no visitation, but anyone was welcome to come to the cemetery for his burial. I asked when that would be and, just before hanging up, she said, “I’ll call you right back.” But in the world of Metro Social Services, “I’ll call you right back” really means, “I’ll call you next Monday or whenever I have time.”
One national holiday and 10 days later, I found myself sitting in a waiting room decorated with posters of Paris and San Francisco. By then I had visited both cemeteries. Bordeaux was the one he and I had talked about. I don’t know if it was just my grief or the chain-link fence or the fact that it overlooked the sewage treatment plant, but I came away ashamed of a city that would knowingly bury poor people in a place so bleak. Hills of Calvary was a cemetery in the traditional sense. Just off Ashland City Highway, it’s a beautiful piece of land with trees and caretakers. I was relieved to find out he’d be going there. Two phone calls and one signature was all it took. Less than 24 hours later, he’d be buried.
Earlier that week I’d gone to the thrift store to buy funeral clothes. Standing in that same store, scouring the bookshelves one day, he’d asked that I not let anyone bury him in a suit. He just wanted regular jeans and a T-shirt with a pocket, if I could find one. “God would never recognize me in a suit,” he added, still trying hard to find the humor in it all. I delivered the clothes to the funeral home in a bag with his name on it.
On the day of his funeral, just ahead of the rain, a white hearse pulled into the driveway and we all watched as it wound its way around to where we stood. At a small plot near the tool shed, the gravediggers became Steve’s pallbearers. They slid the casket gently from the hearse. From under the casket’s lid hung the corner of a snow-white blanket. I suspected then that the bag of clothes was probably still on the office floor where I had left them, and that it didn’t really matter. God was going to recognize him either way.
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