The cemetery is running out of plots

I’m sitting at my computer going over my finances and something is odd. The money in my account seems to be on the short side. I dig in, noticing a number of transactions to the local convenience store. Ah, to be expected — I know I buy beer often but that can’t explain things. I’ll pause for just a second to mention that the universe seems particularly fond of waiting for me to say something dumb and then turning the light bulb on in my head.

So I start tallying up all my alcohol purchases for the last year. I was quite shocked to learn that I bought alcohol over 320 days of the year, and the total was north of $4,500. How did this happen?

Here’s exactly how it happened. Every day when I decided to buy alcohol I made an implicit deal with myself: you quit “soon” and we won’t torment ourselves over this incident. One minute I am in my house finishing up the work day. It is completely benign; the laundry machine is rotating and there are shadows cast in the living room from the glare of passing cars as they rebound through the window. Dishes on the sink. Completely normal, like any other household on the street.

But then, just like a drama series where you just know that something bad is about to go down, the whole landscape changes. What was bright living color suddenly morphs into a 1920s style black and white film, it’s eerie. You hear the film projector clicking. You see a dimly lit street corner where two underworld thugs meet briefly to transact a deal. It’s hush-hush and wink-wink as the desperate one ponies up the cash, and the accomplice takes the goods out of his overcoat pocket and hands them over. In my case: 320 little shady deals, each quietly both transacted and ignored under the false pretense that they were just a prelude to me doing what I had hoped to do all along. My accomplice unnamed, uncaring and non-judgemental; they were just in it for the cash.

In other words, I was outright lying to myself. And the insidious part was that I was believing the lies. It was criminal.

The passage above is what we will call event burial in the act of being negotiated. The man in the passage is not buried under a single dramatic moment that he is now trying to forget. He is buried under three hundred and twenty ordinary moments that each, in their hour, were not events. The financial tally is the first time the three hundred and twenty add up.

The mechanism is worth naming because it operates in most adults and is rarely talked about directly.

Event burial is the practice of pushing difficult moments into the subconscious so that conscious life can continue uninterrupted. The practice is not the same as forgetting. Forgetting is passive — the moment fades because nothing held it in active memory. Burial is active. The mind makes a small decision about a specific moment, and the moment is removed from the inventory of things that require attention.

It is also not the same as what the therapeutic vocabulary calls processing. To process an event is to integrate it — to think about it, name what it was, decide what it means, and place it within a larger narrative of one’s life so that it sits there as a permanent feature. To bury an event is the opposite: to refuse the integration, decline the meaning-making, and let the event sink below the threshold of active recall.

The man at the finances is not failing to remember the 320 convenience-store visits. He remembers each one perfectly well in the hour he made it. He simply makes, in each hour, a small contract with himself that the visit will not be tormented over. You quit “soon” and we won’t torment ourselves over this incident. The contract is renewed daily. By the end of the year the cumulative effect is invisible from inside the contract — until the finances disclose what the daily renewals have actually added up to.

The film-noir image in the passage is precise about what the contract really is. 320 little shady deals. The buying-and-burying is not a single act of cowardice or denial. It is a transaction, with two parties, each of whom benefits in some local sense. The part of the man that wanted the drink got the drink. The part of the man that wanted to quit got the comfortable fiction that he would quit soon. Each got what they paid for. Each agreed not to look at what the other was doing. My accomplice unnamed, uncaring and non-judgemental; they were just in it for the cash.

The accomplice is, of course, the man himself. The transaction is internal. The two thugs at the dimly lit street corner are not separate people. They are the same person playing both roles, each one walking away from the deal with what they came for.

This is the structure of event burial in its most distilled form. Two parts of the self make a deal. The deal involves one event. The event is acknowledged in the transaction (or there would be no transaction) and then both parties agree to look the other way for the rest of the day. Tomorrow the deal is renewed.

The deals scale. Some adults run a deal for a single ongoing situation — a job they hate, a relationship that has gone wrong, a habit they are not yet ready to address. Some adults run dozens of overlapping deals — a different one for each compartment of life that contains something they would rather not look at. The architecture is the same in each case: two parts of the self, an implicit contract, a daily renewal, an accumulating ledger that does not get tallied until something forces the tally.

The tallies are forced occasionally. Finances are a common forcing function. So are routine medical examinations, which produce numbers the patient cannot negotiate with. So are children, who say things you cannot un-hear. So are weddings, funerals, anniversaries — events that force you to stand for a moment in front of who you actually are rather than who the daily deals have permitted you to imagine you are.

Most adults experience these forced tallies a few times in a life. The pattern they reveal is rarely a single event. It is the cumulative shape of years of small contracts.

My buddy from college calls. I hear the voice mail. He’s in town briefly on a layover. We had planned to meet. I hadn’t seen him in years, and may never get the chance anytime soon. The phone clicks off. I’m on the couch in a daze. Was it one bottle of wine, or two? I can’t recall. I turn over as the moment passes.

In the morning my shame is layered on as thick as the funk in my head. It’s all I can do to dismiss the voice mail notification and tell myself it doesn’t matter.

The second passage shows event burial at a different scale. The financial tally was the wholesale view — 320 transactions, $4,500 spent, a year of contracts honored. The voice mail is the retail view — one specific evening, one specific friend, one specific small burial that takes place across a single morning.

Notice the rhythm in the second passage. The phone rings. The man is too far gone to answer. He cannot count the bottles. He turns over. In the morning the shame arrives, briefly, in the form of layered funk. And then the dismissal: It’s all I can do to dismiss the voice mail notification and tell myself it doesn’t matter.

The burial happens in a single sentence. Tell myself it doesn’t matter. The internal contract is signed and filed without ceremony. The friend, whom the man may never see again, is moved from the category of people I will respond to to the category of something I will not think about. The transaction takes less than a minute. The day continues.

The cost of this particular deal is one friendship — or, more accurately, one of the small remaining threads of one friendship, which had been thinning for some time. The man does not weigh the cost when he files the burial. He cannot, because weighing the cost would constitute the kind of attention the burial is designed to prevent. The contract holds precisely because the cost is never made explicit.

Across years, the small contracts of this kind accumulate. The friends not called back. The morning emails not answered. The conversations declined. The invitations that arrived during difficult weeks and were quietly let go. The acquaintances who, eventually, stop reaching out at all. By the time the man at the finances sits down to count the convenience-store transactions, he has run a parallel ledger of social burials for the same years, the same hours, the same accumulating shape.

The cumulative pattern is the thing the essay is pointing at. Any individual burial is defensible. Each one is small. Each one was, in its hour, the easier thing to do. The dishonesty of the practice only becomes visible from the vantage of the total ledger — when the finances disclose the convenience-store year, or when the buried voicemails disclose the slow loss of a particular kind of life.

The man in the passages eventually noticed both. The financial tally was the first forced reckoning; the voicemail was one of several smaller reckonings that arrived over the same months. He did not undo either ledger. The burials had happened; the friends had drifted; the year of $4,500 in convenience-store transactions was a year of his life that had been spent in a particular way. What he could do was stop running the deals going forward — stop signing the daily contracts, stop renewing the agreement that the next 320 transactions would also be unwatched.

Any objective observer looking in would have to conclude that the cemetery was running out of plots.

The line is the seal of the recognition. Each buried event is not, in the man’s own framing, a death exactly. It is something closer to a plot reserved — a piece of internal ground that has been consecrated for the purpose of not-looking-at-what-is-buried-here. As the years run, the consecrated plots accumulate. At some point the cemetery starts to fill up. The man begins to notice that there is less unburied ground available than there used to be. The next thing he wants to bury has nowhere clean to go.

This is the moment most adults arrive at, in some form, at some point. Not a moment of crisis exactly. A moment of arithmetic. The ground has been used. The deals have been honored. The cemetery is what it is.

What becomes available, when the burials stop, is the unmodified life. Lived in its actual conditions. Attended to rather than navigated around. The friends called back. The financial tallies done before the year is over. The events of one’s life metabolized rather than packed away in the dark.

The hedonic system has nothing left to recover from, because there is no longer a daily transaction siphoning attention out of conscious life. The body returns to itself. The mind returns to itself. The cemetery quietly stops needing new plots, because the ground that was being prepared for the next batch is not being prepared anymore. The man is simply living, in the unmodified sense, in the conditions he is actually in.

Most of the work of getting there is not heroic. It is the small, repeated practice of declining to sign the next contract. The convenience store is open; the man does not go in. The voicemail arrives; the man picks up the phone. The hour that would have been spent in transaction becomes an hour that is simply lived, in whatever shape it happens to take.

— Ben Walker