Boswell Avenue Cemetery appears in Dominick Birdsey’s recollections as a place where family history is written unevenly in stone. The imposing grave of Domenico Onofrio Tempesta and the small, overlooked grave of Ignazia lie on opposite sides of the cemetery; their separation sharpens Dominick’s questions about what his family remembered, concealed, or failed to pass on.

The Graves and Their Distance

Domenico’s monument is described as an ornate granite structure seven or eight feet tall, with cement angels whose faces are contorted in pain. Ma had told Dominick that Domenico made his own burial arrangements in advance, a choice that fits the scale of a memorial befitting the self-styled great man from humble beginnings. Its conspicuous grandeur contrasts with the barely remembered grave of Ignazia, Dominick’s grandmother.

Ignazia’s small stone had escaped the family’s notice until Dominick and Thomas worked for the Three Rivers Public Works Department during the summer. It stood far across the cemetery from Domenico’s monument. The distance prompts Dominick to wonder why the couple were not buried together and why Ma had never taken the twins to see her mother’s grave.

A Place of Incomplete Knowledge

Dominick cannot recall the dates of Ignazia’s life and realizes he will have to return to the cemetery to find her stone and check them. The planned visit has not yet supplied an answer: the grave is a material trace of a family past that he knows exists but cannot fully reconstruct. In the same recollection, the monument’s carefully arranged magnificence sits beside his uncertainty about Ignazia’s age and the circumstances of her death.

The cemetery also connects family memory to Dominick’s dream of Ignazia. He recalls seeing his drowned grandmother on Halloween night, the night he totaled his truck, and remembers standing on ice above lost limbo babies. He wonders why she came to him and what she wanted. The grave thus belongs both to a physical landscape he intends to revisit and to a dream image through which unresolved family history returns.

Narrative Significance

The cemetery’s opposed graves make remembrance visibly unequal: Domenico’s prearranged monument announces his presence, while Ignazia’s small stone was unknown to her grandsons. Dominick’s questions about their burial places and Ma’s silence turn a visit not yet made into an inquiry into inheritance. The epitaph associated with Domenico’s memorial, “THE GREATEST GRIEFS ARE SILENT,” resonates with that silence, even as Dominick’s recollection gives the neglected grave a place in the family story.