I regularly go out to the suburbs on the bus to visit the place where my late husband’s ashes are buried. It’s a nice outing; I take the 44 bus, which usually isn’t too jammed, and it rockets along one of the dumbest highways in the country, the Schuylkill Expressway, until Route 1 gets to nice sedate Bala Cynwyd where there are sidewalks with no one on them except me and a few people heading for work at the big Target.

From the bus stop, it’s about a mile down to Laurel Hill Cemetery, in between large apartment buildings and office buildings set way off the street with big parking lots. It’s not a particularly pretty walk or an easy one, but once I get to the cemetery, everything is different.

Suddenly I am walking in between dogwoods in bloom, great huge trees sprouting leaves, and vast rolling hills lined with implacable little tombs, mausoleums, sarcophagi, and flat plaques. Everywhere, all around me, there are the stately memorials of people who aren’t around any more, some of them completely unremembered, others with fresh flowers on them.

As I headed up the hill to where he’s buried, I said aloud, “It’s complicated,” answering the things I was saying in my head, and walked to his plaque, set flush with the grass, still looking newly chiseled three years after the fact. He’s in one of the tracts where ashes are getting buried lately, because ashes don’t take up much space so they fit them into little puzzle pieces in the landscape. All around him there are fancy gravestones, most of them settled a little crooked except for the new ones, and then there’s that nice line of new cremation plots.

My husband is number one in the row, though one of the plots doesn’t have a plaque in it yet. I call his neighbors in the row his girlfriends and boyfriends: Gayle, Edmund, Lisa, and whoever it is at the end whose name I forget. My husband always had lots of friends, close friends, and he loved to cultivate people’s acquaintance and make them love him. I’m glad he’s not by himself.

Like my husband, Gayle and Edmund get regular visits from family members, who leave them flowers; Gayle has fresh hyacinths and gladiola, plus a little plastic heart with crystals in it, and Edmund has plastic roses and carnations in vases stuck in the ground. Lisa and the other girl don’t have flowers, but someone paid to have roses (Lisa) and hyacinths (the other woman) chiseled into the stone.

My husband’s plaque has a tiny red Matchbox Jaguar car buried next to it, a replacement for the one someone stole because I didn’t bury the first one far enough. My kid and I agreed he needed a Jaguar, because he owned a used one once and was bitterly sad he had to sell it. It also has our cat Sugar’s ashes sprinkled around it, because she died the year after he did, and some tulips I planted. Most of the tulips have gotten mown down, but one of them managed to bloom. There was grass, chickweed, dandelions, and mock strawberry all around his grave.

But he’s dead, you know. I realized that a couple of weeks ago, I mean really realized it. A friend said that the guy who ran her husband’s funeral told her it takes at least a year before you realize your husband is really gone; until there he’s just on a long business trip.

I talked to my boy anyway, even though he’s dead. I told him about the cough I had, and about my trips to Baltimore, New York City, and Longwood Gardens. I told him what Trump’s doing and filled him in on my adult kid’s new part time temporary job. I told him off (once again) for not getting a colonoscopy when he was due. I told him I missed him. He’s not there. I know that. I have to tell him anyway.

Like the guy on the bus said yesterday, your dead family members can’t answer you back when you go talk to them, so you can say what you want.

I paid a good chunk of money to put him in that little plot, and at the same time I paid for room for a box of my own ashes, and space on the plaque for my name when I go. I told him I was doing that, near the end of his life, and it made him feel all kinds of ways. He really did not expect that.

See, he always figured I was going to leave him, and he knocked himself out trying to take care of me so I wouldn’t go, but I ended up taking care of him at the end. And then he left me. He didn’t want to, mind you. After days and days of hanging on in the hospice clinic, he was still breathing, even though he hadn’t been conscious for a long, long time and he looked like a withered turtle. We had to tell him it was okay to go, our kid and I, that he didn’t need to take care of us. We would be okay. Then we left and the staff called us soon after to tell us he died, as if we had given permission and he had waited until we were gone.

Yet I don’t particularly want to be buried with him. I don’t suppose it matters, since I won’t be alive. But it was hard enough being married for 46 years to anyone, and I can’t imagine spending eternity with him. Not because I didn’t love him, but because I am solitary. I do not want to live with anyone. It is a tremendous relief not to be married any more, and to have no company except my cat in my house. Maybe being in a separate box will help. I always had a study of my own and wouldn’t let him just barge in whenever he wanted.

Except I told him I missed him. I told him he was a son of a bitch for leaving me. I put a bunch of yellow tulips on his plaque, because he didn’t hate tulips, and he sort of liked the color yellow, and I headed off.

I walked past a big old mausoleum with bronze doors and a stained glass window, with spiky plants in urns on the front step, past another mausoleum with paved paths leading to the road as if the deceased could take a stroll whenever the impulse struck, past one grave that was just a stone bench with a name on top of it, and dandelions all around it. Some graves had American flags by them, usually people who had been in the armed services. Off in the distance I saw an obelisk. That’s a heck of a thing to put on someone’s grave, as if you’re making sure they’re staying put.

Most of the monuments were conventional (Art Deco, Art Nouveau, fake Egyptian, Greek, improbable hodgepodges of various Classical, Renaissance, and Baroque styles) but some were their own sort of weird, like one great uncouth raw block of stone with green bronze plaques riveted to it, all bearing the family’s various names, with one last name chiseled aslant across the raw stone in capital letters. I have some other family members (my dad’s side of the family) buried in a family group on the other side of the cemetery, and their headstones are weirdly shaped too, like big thick scrolls.

People had paid a lot for prime death real estate at crossroads in that cemetery, or had bought enough land that they could hang out for eternity with their families. Names changed from generation to generation (Gough became Goff became someone’s maiden name). Trees had grown up around tombs where they had been planted too close, vast hollies and spruces shoving against the stone walls.

I was the only mourner anywhere that I could see, though. A cyclist pumped past at one point, and a couple walking their dog. A pickup truck full of tools rolled by me, because cemeteries need a lot of maintenance. Catbirds, crows, and sparrows were screaming everywhere, in honor of spring, and planes hummed overhead.

It smelled pretty good, but it was hot for April. It didn’t used to be until May 1 that I couldn’t see through the trees for the leaves any more, but it’s earlier this year now that the world is a little bit on fire.

I exited out the back entrance, the way I came, past the pet cemetery on one side and the administration building for the pet cemetery (a sweet clapboard building with nice trim) on the other. I don’t think I will do anything so fancy with my current cat, when he goes, maybe sprinkle his ashes around my husband’s plaque, though neither my husband nor our cat is acquainted with him.

Why do I visit? I don’t have to. He’s not there. Partly it’s my competitiveness. I’m damned if I’m going to let Gayle’s family and Edmond’s show me up. It’s also because I still don’t quite understand that my husband died on me. And besides, I promised him I would visit; I keep my promises like a monster, when I remember to look at my calendar (I forgot to go last month). And partly it’s because it’s a lovely walk and I like to go on adventures. But mostly, I don’t know why I go. It’s complicated.

When I realized a couple of weeks ago that he was really dead, I realized that I’m not.

I am still alive. There was a while there, I was apparently just getting myself ready for the inevitable, you know. I decluttered my house, wrote my will, wrote a memoir, organized all my photos, gave away anything I didn’t need, and got myself ready. I was all set. But if I live until August, I’m going to be year older than he was when he died, so who knows. I might just keep going.