Q21

 That's the location of Tom Artis's grave in the Camp Butler cemetery just outside of Springfield, IL. When you get there, and go to the visitor's center, there's a pretty brick building with a sign that says Grsve Locator, and there's a kiosk where you type in the last name, and ir prints you out a map with the location listed. If you come there on a Thursday morning , you won't see a living human being,and I think that's as it should be.

My dad was cremated, my older brother was cremated, and I guess I will be too. There's a carelessness about the process that either bespeaks confidence or despair, depending. There's no idea of reciprocity, or continuity, or tradition, in going to his grave on the anniversary of his death. Just a necessity I don't think I can describe.

It was just two bodies, one dead, one not yet dead. It wasn't my intention necessarily to do this alone, but it turned out right. It was better not to stand in front of his headstone armored and comforted by friends or family: alone and unarmed is maybe best.

Because it still hurts like the collapse of all the joy of my life to look upon this: not just the Big Mystery, but the savage injustice to his talent and the loss of my best friend. It's a thing that sucks music out of music and sunlight out of sunlight, and makes one's heart beat an angry and distraught complaint, again and again. 

I came, not to pay my respects to Tom, but my respects to Death. The process of dying can easily be thought of as an action of living: it's a falling, a rising, going through a door and shutting it behind, crossing a river and going into the trees, whence no report returneth. Going further up and further in, with this lion beside you? It's going to Hogwarts, Narnia, or Valinor. You can call it  part of life.

This lying in the ground a year later, not so much.

Ultimately, I think I did it to keep Tom from being a fancy. Telling a story about him now, even to myself, would make him more a character of mine. And he's not.

He's Q21.