“We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” —Oscar Wilde
Some kids had playgrounds. I had Hopewell Cemetery.
My mom said it was historical. I thought it was holy.
We lost a lot of people early—friends, family, my grandparents—and somehow the cemetery became less a place of endings and more like a neighborhood with long, quiet conversations. I’d sit under the trees, fingers tracing the names in stone, talking to people I missed, or just lying back, watching the clouds drift like thoughts.
Sometimes I’d bring flowers. Sometimes I’d bring secrets.
I didn’t always know what to say, but the quiet never minded. That’s the thing about cemeteries—if you sit still long enough, they start talking back. Not in words. In breeze. In memory. In the way the grass leans toward you like it remembers, too.
Hopewell wasn’t eerie to me. It was sacred. Familiar. A place where the veil felt thinner, where I could be soft without apology.
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The first time I heard Cemetry Gates by The Smiths, I felt seen in the strangest way.
Morrissey wasn’t mourning. He was waltzing through the same kind of place I’d grown up in—with wit, not weeping. A graveyard, yes, but no grief. Just two people talking, sparring over stolen lines and long-dead poets.
I loved that. The refusal to make it all heavy. The way it said: You can be reverent and still laugh. You can walk among the stones without bowing your head.
“Keats and Yeats are on your side / But you lose / ’Cause Wilde is on mine.”
I didn’t know who I sided with back then, but I knew I wanted to be the kind of person who could throw out a line like that and mean it.
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Oscar Wilde always felt like a kindred spirit to me. Not because I’m nearly as clever, but because he taught me the power of turning pain into punchlines.
There’s a quiet rebellion in humor. A refusal to let sorrow take the whole stage. Wilde knew that. So does Morrissey, in his own peculiar way.
And maybe I didn’t fully realize it then, but walking through Hopewell with a notebook in my lap, scribbling poems and prayers and random observations that was my own weird version of Wilde. My way of saying, I’m here, I see you, and I refuse to be quiet about it.
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People think of cemeteries as places where life ends. But for me, they were where life took shape.
I learned how to listen there. How to remember. How to imagine.
As a kid, I’d talk to friends who were gone, to grandparents I missed with my whole chest. I’d pray. I’d play. Sometimes I’d just be still.
And I think those hours made me a better artist, a better mother, a better human. They taught me reverence—not the church kind, but the real kind. The kind that makes you pay attention.
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I still love Cemetry Gates. Still laugh when Wilde wins the line. Still believe there’s something holy about walking among the names and letting your thoughts stretch past the edges of your skin.
I don’t go to Hopewell as often as I used to, but when I do, I bring my kids. I show them the trees. The quiet. The stones that remember our people.
And maybe one day, they’ll hear that song. Maybe they’ll grin at the bickering over poets. Maybe they’ll understand why cemeteries don’t scare me.
Maybe they’ll know that sometimes, the most alive you’ll ever feel is when you’re sitting with the dead, borrowing a little silence for yourself, turning it into a story and realizing, Wilde was right. Even from the gutter, you can find stars.
