Six Feet Over It (27 page)

I WAS IN EIGHTH GRADE
when my dad and one of his running club pals bought our town cemetery, partly as a financial investment but also so he could say “I bought a graveyard!” at parties.

My sisters and I picked up rocks in the grass among the headstones for the sake of the mower blades, weeded flower beds, and planted bulbs, and now and then we took off our muddy gloves to file papers or answer the office phone. One summer the regular receptionist/grave salesperson took an extended vacation, so I filled in and—I am not making this up—the first customer on my first day was At Need, there to bury his son. That guy cried.
A lot.

At Need is commerce mixed with grief, an odd cocktail from the same bartender who brought us
Commerce + Love = Huge Expensive Weddings. Commerce + Death = Pre-Need
means carefully planned caskets and flowers and headstones and a new black dress because apparently navy blue is insincere and I’ll never make
that
mistake again.

But oh,
Commerce + Grief.

This is sitting across from people so heartsick they can’t breathe for crying, and your instinct as a normal person is to comfort them, but instead you’ve got to keep asking them questions about money. And sure, they came to you expecting this, and yes, this is your job, so you keep it together, but
God.
Eventually they take a cue from you and pull themselves together long enough to get the money part over with, when what they really want to say is
“Just do whatever, I don’t care, it doesn’t matter.”
Because it doesn’t. Still, someone has to prepare the body, and someone has to dig the grave or fill the urn. Someone in the mourning family must be voted to take the checkbook and keep it together while someone else sells them a grave and keeps it together.

I wasn’t in the office for long, and never under duress. But at the desk and out in the graves, the whole “grief as commodity” thing really started to get to me, which led me down the rabbit hole of the unequal distribution of who gets to fall apart and who has to keep it together. When do the keep-it-together-ers get to be the fall-apart-ers, or do they never have a turn? It made me want to yell at everyone standing over the open graves,
This is not a contest!
I watched people bogart grief (and the attention it got them) like you wouldn’t believe, while someone else just as sad had to provide ballast in the storm with silent calm. Keeping it together.

Six Feet Over It
is a story about a girl keeping it together. Maybe she shouldn’t have to, but she’s good at it and someone has to do it, so she does it until she just—can’t. Because then what happens?

If she’s lucky, maybe what happens is she finds people who take her hand and help her raise it. So she can ask for her turn.

Melissa Sarver. A saintly patient magician of an agent is gift enough, but one willing to stick to her author’s various guns and who is also a whip-smart editor with a refreshing lack of tolerance for foolishness? Words cannot adequately express my gratitude to her, for her.

Chelsea Eberly, who found the real story hidden among a few hundred thousand superfluous words and showed me how to tell it. How I got so lucky to have her for an editor is one more mystery, like all the best in life, that will never be solved. So I’m content to just be endlessly thankful.

Mallory Loehr and her team at Random House Children’s Books for rescuing this book from limbo; her New York number on my caller ID nearly gave me a stroke. Still not over it. Amazing. Alison Kolani and the copyediting staff at Random House for ridiculously meticulous, sharp minds—and pens.

Sarah McCarry; first to read, first to give me reason to keep writing. Elizabeth Kaplan and Suzy Capozzi for loving the story. Margaret Kelso, Charlie Meyers, and Bernadette Cheyne at Humboldt State University. The Belt and Hermann families for an apparently bottomless well of detail and memory. Daniel Lazar, Jenni Holm, Lisa Brown, Jessie Sholl, Jen Nadol, Sangu Mandana, Cheryl Klein, Chris Baty and the staff of NaNoWriMo, and Beth Lisick and Arlene Klatte of San Francisco’s Porchlight Storytelling Series for writing guidance and inspiration.

Brett Douville, John and Coe Leta Stafford, Stephen McManus and Renee Diascenti, Julia Thollaug, Julia “J. K. Rizzle” Neal, The Wallach-Neal family, Jean and Ruby Fife, Carmel Adams, Erin Wright, Brad Comito, Lida Jones, Karen Corby, Amy Wagner, and Ellen Harding for early reads and immeasurable kindness. Christine Falletti for friendship, comfort, and rallying when revisions made me cry. And always. My family: Joe Hart; Daniel Slauson; Patrick Clark; the Temmermans; the Kiekhaefers; James, Henri, and June Longo; and Tim, Vickie and Cordelia Longo for unfathomable love and encouragement. Robert Irvin for more than I can say. Sarah and Alex Neuse for open hearts, willing shoulders, steadfast love. Analise Langford, inspiration incarnate, whose own metamorphosis was a wonder to behold. My sister, Christine Kiekhaefer. Writer, reader, editor. There from the start, there for it all. My heart. I could not do without you.

Timothy Longo Jr.: This one is not for you, but because of you.

JENNIFER LONGO
holds an MFA in Writing for Theater from Humboldt State University. She credits her lifelong flair for drama to parents who did things like buy the town graveyard and put their kids to work in it—because how hilarious would that be? Turns out, pretty hilarious. Jennifer lives in Seattle with her husband and daughter and writes about writing at taotejen.com.