So we embarked on a summer road trip, my wife, our three children and I, off to confront our personal demises. (Here I can sense America’s grandpas setting their newspaper beside the armchair, looking overtop their collective reading glasses, and asking if we visited Gettysburg. Sirs, we did not.) We rambled through Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Iowa and Illinois. On Madeline Island, in Wisconsin, we visited the La Pointe Indian Cemetery, shoved up against thundering Lake Superior. The grounds there are populated with tilted stelae and Ojibwe spirit houses, low wooden structures covering burial spots. The cemetery is cordoned off by a metal fence adorned with beads and bangles, strips of cloth and bark, plastic fidgets and sun-dried stuffed animals. We stood at the boundary and did not cross.

On Mackinac Island, Mich., in Lake Huron, we saw the graves of people who had been dead for 200 years. As we wandered in that sylvan cemetery, my 9-year-old predicted she would die by “wrecking ball,” which is not a phrase I encountered on other tombstones along the way.

During our sojourn, we saw grave markers etched with angels, with horses, with big-rig semis, with Santa Claus, with the logo of the Detroit Lions. People died in infancy and in the War of 1812, by falling through ice and by gunshot. On the northern shore of Lake Michigan, we visited the Gros Cap Cemetery, which claims to be the oldest continuously used cemetery in the United States of America. The land had been a burial ground for Anishinaabe people as far back as the 1600s, and for Michiganders as recently as the 2020s.

We talked about what might be a good way to die, or what that could even mean, and what we wanted done with our bodies after we were dead. Eventually the kids accepted that I was not going to stop talking about cemetery summer and engaged, in their own roundabout ways. Our 16-year-old, who loves cooking, settled on his final state: cremated and then sifted into the dough for his hand-pulled linguine recipe. “You know how there’s squid ink spaghetti?” he said. “Like that.”

By the end of the trip, I had begun to notice little cemeteries everywhere, humble lots beside rural highways, scenic benches dedicated to people long past, impromptu memorials at the bases of telephone poles. Everywhere there were lives that had been lived and commemorated. I understood this as a way of encountering the world: to remain attuned to the ghosts native to that place.