Saying What We Dare Not Say

A burial ceremony at Greensprings Natural Cemetery Preserve

November 15, 2025

No, I’m not talking about those things we’re ashamed of, the things we did that we cringe to think of.

I mean the milder, stickier things. Things I imagine someone is thinking about me and that I don’t dare bring up, for fear that my worry will be confirmed, and some kind of tacit, mutually accepted peace between me and another person will be permanently ruptured. Or, even worse, what if the other person turns out not to have those opinions about me and will now be inspired by my own foolish revelation to regard me in the very way I’ve dreaded? 

Here's a personal example: 

Earlier this year, I was briefly employed as a burial coordinator at Greensprings Natural Cemetery where I had been volunteering for about three and a half years. I loved helping out with burials, being present for people at that hard time in their lives, and preparing a beautiful grave into which the deceased would rest without toxic embalming or a thick, weather-proof casket. When one of the four part-time burial coordinators (BCs) decided to go back to school and get an advanced degree, the director and board hired two new BCs, and I was one.

However, it turned out the job and I simply weren’t suited for each other. For one thing, I was terrible at accurately measuring burial sites in Greensprings’ four big meadows. Perhaps the biggest challenge of all was that I had been self-employed for more than fifty years, accustomed to coming and going as I wished without having to check with anyone (sometimes much to my husband’s consternation). So I resigned before the director had to fire me—which was bound to happen soon. Immediately I went back to volunteering, an arrangement we were all much happier with.

However, when the BC whom I was to replace told me that she was not going to go back to school after all but would stay on at the cemetery, I felt terrible. I believed that my ineptness had deprived her of an important opportunity in her life, that I had canceled her dream.

A few days ago we ran into each other in the supermarket, and after catching up on our news, I confessed my guilty secret about being responsible for a major disappointment in her life.

 “Oh no!” she responded. She told me that, after I left, she and the director had talked about how to go forward, and the idea had arisen that a new job could be created that would carry more responsibility, more hours, and better pay. My colleague knew that she was right for the job, and the director agreed.

 We both felt so relieved by that airing of truths.

 What a good lesson, I thought, as I left the supermarket. As long as we stash these gloomy assumptions in our own psyche, all they do is fester. A question knots around itself and never untangles into an answer. Yes, it is a risk to air those assumptions. Yet even if the response from the other person turns out to be exactly as I had feared, I now know the truth. Then I can deal with that reality, instead of a made-up scenario.

What I’m reading…

I’ve been reading a lot of fiction lately: Purity by Jonathan Franzen, The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing, Intermezzo by Sally Rooney, and now I’ve almost finished Braided Lives by Marge Piercy. Piercy has written many books, none of which I had read until I discovered this one at our local used bookstore. It’s told from the point of view of Jill Stuart, an independent, intellectual young woman from a working class background, who is an undergraduate at the University of Michigan from 1953-57.

Some of the themes are shockingly familiar. One is the concern of activist students during the McCarthy era that they could be targeted by the FBI for protesting. Another is the problem of unwanted pregnancy and the women’s desperate search for a safe illegal abortion. This book was published in 1982, when women in America no longer had those worries. We, the readers, are presumably meant to look back at that time with relief that both our voices and our bodies are now under our own control. Whoever could have dreamed that we are so much closer in that respect to the 50s than the 80s?

That’s Piercy herself on the cover.