The summer after my father attempted suicide, I found myself wandering through a graveyard near my house, up and down the rows of sunken headstones and faded pink cloth roses. I didn’t know a soul buried there, and I didn’t know what solace I expected to find. All I knew was that here, if anywhere, was an object lesson in impermanence: hundreds of graves bordered by a six-lane thruway, a storage warehouse, and two used-car lots packed with SUVs. There was no entrance, just an opening where the drooping chain-link fence fell apart completely.