A few days ago we buried my mother in Hopewell Cemetery, Hanceville, Alabama. She lies next to her husband, Carl Edwin Jacobs, who died in 2009 on their fifty-fifth wedding anniversary. Next to them are the graves of my father’s parents, Elisha Creel Jacobs (1902–1971) and Margaret Doran Jacobs (1909–1997).

But why are they all here? Not one of them ever lived a day in Hanceville, and each of them died in Birmingham, where they spent most of their lives.

The answer may be found on a small stone on the opposite side of my grandparents’ graves from my parents’ graves:

Bobby Jacobs — more formally Robert Alan Jacobs — was the second son of Elisha and Margaret, born nineteen months after Carl. I am named for this uncle I never knew, but with the first and middle names reversed. Bobby had a club foot and could never walk properly; my father, who early on assumed the role of Bobby’s chief caregiver, used to pull him around the neighborhood in a wagon. But the club foot was only the first of Bobby’s misfortunes; later he contracted polio and died, a few weeks shy of his sixth birthday.

Immediately after Bobby took his last breath, Carl, then seven years old, did a peculiar thing: he ran straight to the tallest pecan tree in his yard and climbed to the highest branch that would bear him, where he clung, weeping. He remained perched there for hours and hours; no one could talk him down, until, as night fell, someone finally fetched the local Baptist minister, whose authority, maybe, was sufficient to compel Carl to return to the land of the living — and the dead. Or maybe the boy was just worn out.

At the time of Bobby’s death, my grandmother was pregnant with her third child, to be born the following year: Elisha Creel Jacobs, Jr. My father occasionally reminded me that “After Bobby died, your grandmother took to her bed for two years and didn’t lift a goddamn finger.” He despised his mother and, probably because I loved her so intensely, wanted me to despise her too, so when he said this he never mentioned that during those two years, after having lost one child, she had to bear another. Though they didn’t use the word “depression” in those days, much less “postpartum depression,” she must have been profoundly depressed, and that shouldn’t have been difficult for anyone to understand.

(Also worth remembering, perhaps: she was 19 when she gave birth to Bobby, and 25 when he died.)

There’s much I could say about my father, not all of it bad, and I will acknowledge some of the better things on another occasion, but at the moment I am compelled to state that for much of his life he was a shockingly cruel man. When his younger brother E.C. died, in 2000, and E.C.’s ex-wife called my father to give him the news, my father replied “I don’t give a shit” and hung up the phone. I don’t know where this cruelty came from, but I have a strange but persistent intuition that it originated with Bobby’s death — or, rather, emerged in that moment, immediately after Bobby’s death, when instead of grieving with his mother and father he chose to climb that tree and grieve alone, holding his misery as fiercely as he gripped the swaying branch that kept him aloft, high above the human world. This is, I suspect, why even as an old man he was intolerant of his mother’s sorrow at the loss of that same child, the child that she had borne in her own body. It’s my grief, he seemed to say, not ours — and certainly not yours.

My grandfather had many siblings, but the one to whom he was closest, both emotionally and geographically, was the woman we called Aunt B: Bethelee Jacobs Basenberg. She was sixteen years older than my grandfather and I think she must have been a kind of mother to him. (His own mother, when Bobby died, was living in Mississippi, at a time when such distances were harder to bridge. For instance, no one in my family then had telephones, and the roads were often poor. Many of my rural and small-town relatives may not have had electricity in 1934.) I knew her much later, of course, but I remember her vividly: a grand old matriarch who, long after the passing of her husband Mart, still ran their farm. She grew corn mostly, but also had a kitchen garden where she nurtured strawberries and sugar cane, and when we visited she would send me away with grocery bags full of both. One of the vividest memories of my childhood involves sitting at our kitchen table at home and squeezing syrup from her canes over a bowl of her strawberries.

Aunt B’s farm was just outside Hanceville, where she was for many decades a devoted member of Hopewell Baptist Church. Indeed, she is buried in the same cemetery, a few yards from her younger brother, who outlived her by a mere two months.

And now I think we can, with some confidence, piece the story together. When Bobby died, Elisha and Margaret must have turned to Bethelee, that sheet anchor and faithful Christian — they themselves were never more than intermittent churchgoers, nor were their children later — and she must have taken charge of the situation, bringing her nephew’s body to the graveyard next to the church where she worshipped every week. That tiny rectangle with its awkwardly formed epitaph was all that they could afford then, in the depths of the Great Depression, but at least she could watch over the boy’s grave and make sure it was graced with flowers, probably flowers from her own garden.

And then, in time, the rest of the family came to their repose at the same spot — all except poor E.C., the favorite uncle of my youth, whose place of burial, thanks to my father’s mean indifference, remains unknown to me, though I have searched for it. E.C. was a man of many sins and many sorrows, and perhaps some day I will be able to give him, too, a proper tribute.

At the moment, though, I am thinking of the raw red dirt that now marks my mother’s grave, a grave soon to be covered with grass, like the others, all but one of which feature dignified upright tombstones. The larger picture: In the middle, my grandmother and grandfather; to one side of them their eldest son Carl and his wife Dolores; to the other side the child whose death initiated this story, a little boy, misshapen in body and then racked by a vile disease, whose brief life is now marked by a chunk of rock invisible except to the attentive — a little boy who was greatly, greatly cherished, and whose death brought lasting misery to his family.

My father used to say, sneeringly, “Oh, when you were born, Mama thought she had Bobby back, had Bobby all over again.” But Daddy, if you didn’t want her to feel that way, why did you give me his name? You couldn’t have “Bobby all over again” only for yourself.

As I say, we buried my mother yesterday, and to my family I read the beautiful and consoling words of the Book of Common Prayer: “O God, who by the glorious resurrection of your Son Jesus Christ destroyed death, and brought life and immortality to light: Grant that your servant Dolores, being raised with him, may know the strength of his presence, and rejoice in his eternal glory … In sure and certain hope of the resurrection to eternal life through our Lord Jesus Christ, we commend to Almighty God our mother Dolores, and we commit her body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. The Lord bless her and keep her; the Lord make his face to shine upon her and be gracious to her; the Lord lift up his countenance upon her and give her peace. Amen.”

But for some reason — perhaps because I have been grieving my mother’s death for some time already — it’s Bobby I am thinking of today. My father lived eighty-two years, my mother ninety-four; Bobby never made it to age six. Now, of course, those gathered in that little country churchyard “accept the constitution of silence / And are folded in a single party.” May light perpetual shine upon them all.