May 1909. A man named John M. Whiteford, born in Germany, dies from a brain hemorrhage on Brooklyn’s Willoughby Avenue, a few blocks south of the address where I’d live more than a century later. Whiteford was forty-four years old, married with three children, when his family buried him in Lot 3467 of Green-Wood Cemetery. June 1916. Seven years after Whiteford, Claude L. Hanford, a doctor born in Manhattan, dies in the brownstone apartment I’d live in, also of pneumonia. Buried in Lot 31764, he was thirty years old and unmarried. Gravesite ledgers contain records of home and family, body and breath. I typed my address into the Green-Wood archive, and within five minutes, I’d found entire ghosts — the men who had lived and died in my apartment. Some histories are made to float, ready to be plucked from the past like a stick from a stream. Others suffer neglect, as if sand slipping through memory’s fissures. Like acts of preservation, acts of erasure are not accidental.
February 1982, a hospital along Queens Boulevard. Fifteen years after coming to America, my maternal grandfather coughs until his cancer-threaded lungs collapse. He was fifty-six. I don’t know where his grave is. I don’t know the city in Iraq where he was born. For the first twenty years of my life, I didn’t even know the exact date of his death.
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