I found love in a hopeless place
Spoiler alert: it was a muddy graveyard hill 🪦🫙💖
CHAPTER 1: Lakeview Cemetery
I don’t know why it took me so long to appreciate Seattle’s Lakeview Cemetery. I’ve lived in my neighborhood off and on since 1997, and sometimes it feels like I know Capitol Hill’s cracks and crevices like the veins on the backs of my own hands.
I’d known about Lakeview, of course. It’s the home of both Bruce and Brandon Lee’s graves, and it’s thought of as Seattle’s “Pioneer Cemetery” because so many of the city’s founders are buried there. In the early ’00s, when I was living in Los Angeles and slightly homesick, I loved seeing Lakeview in the title credits of HBO’s Six Feet Under every week.
When my son was a toddler, I’d stand bleary and exhausted as he played at the Volunteer Park playground, sipping my tea and musing on the poetry of the cemetery being right next to the play area. I love that there are only a few feet and a chainlink fence separating the sounds of squealing children from the silence of the gravestones. There’s a great metaphor in there somewhere!
But it wasn’t until these past few years that Lakeview Cemetery has become a friend of mine, one of my favorite neighborhood walks.
