Burgers and Bones
My great-great-great-great-great aunt would like to order a Double Whopper with cheese, please.
This first appeared on my Substack, Unsorted but Significant.
When I die, bury me down
at the Waffle House
and don’t you bring no roses
to set upon my grave.
’Cause I want all of my ashes to be
scattered, smothered and covered.
And Big Jim by the grill can sing ‘Amazing Grace.’
— Uncle Goo
NORTH KINGSTOWN, Rhode Island
When she drew her final breath on March 25, 1831, Jane Adelaid Anthony Vaughan was in her mid-50s and living in a nation presidented (yes, I made that verb up) by Andrew Jackson. The Erie Canal was freshly open a couple states west, and her nephew would use it the following year to move his family from upstate New York to forestland west of Cleveland.
She was my great-great-great-great-great aunt, the daughter of Manoel Antonio, the first Anthony in America in our line. She has not moved in 194 years, as far as I am aware.
A few weekends ago, I stood at her grave as I have so many times since my sister found this patch of land and I first visited in the summer of 1982. I did a 360, taking in the secluded cul-de-sac and the careworn, sometimes topsy-turvy gravestones. And I realized something.
I realized that, hundreds of times a day, Jane Adelaid Anthony Vaughan — with her husband, Royal, beside her and most of their children, too — are within earshot of a single succinct, possibility-filled sentence that around here, for at least the past four decades, echoes into eternity:
“Pull up to the window, please.”
“The problem with being a pioneer is that you often die out before your settlement thrives. You’re in the ground for years before the village becomes a town; decades before the town becomes a city.”
— Victor LaValle, “My Favorite Richard Matheson Story Is the One I Lived Through,” Electric Literature Magazine
She arrived in this world in the same decade as the nation. She died just a bit more than a half century later. It would be six decades after Jane Adelaid Anthony Vaughan’s death that the hamburger as we know it emerged, and Burger King not for another six decades after that.
Not that she’s likely aware of any of that. She departed for her next journey long, long ago. Her gravestone is emblazoned with a quatrain that has haunted me vaguely, dancing around the back of my brain since I first saw it at age 14:
Behold and see as you pass by.
As you are now, so once was I.
As I am now, so you must be.
Prepare for death and follow me!
For more than four decades, I have been visiting cemeteries across the United States. Many of them I visit because they contain my ancestors (or might). I found my great-great-great grandparents resting next to a Ground Round and across from a Taco Bell. My grandparents sleep on a bluff just off Interstate 71 in Ohio. My parents wait out eternity on a hill north of Pittsburgh, overlooking a Giant Eagle supermarket and the Joe Ball GMC dealership.
Other graveyards with no direct connection beckon me, too. I simply pull off the road and wander through, trying to absorb some sense of the American strangers whose journeys ended on a particular patch of land they may have never even visited in life. “Every grave is an entire story that you may never know,” my father used to say. I think of that every time I visit his.
I’ve always taken comfort in knowing that I have people in the ground across the republic, dating to the 1600s. Seeing them, visiting them, pondering them and who they might have been — somehow that all makes me feel more American. It’s a feeling I crave.
I’ve seen my people’s graves in churchyards and backyards, in vast memorial parks, atop old mounds of dirt in the woods of upstate New York and along hillsides across the street from menacing-looking bars in rust-belt cities. I’ve seen stones in German and English, in Hebrew and Czech and Dutch. I have seen hundreds of cemeteries full of graves that sat silently while the trappings of the modern world took shape and rose around them.
I have always loved this little cemetery in particular. I love its tucked-away nature, even if part of the blanket doing the tucking also comes with fries and a medium Coke product. We’ve joked about it for years. “I want to go to the Burger King” became family code for, “Let’s go see the Vaughan graveyard.” Perhaps not the advertising that BK intended.
But I’m a product of my era. While I am very at home with the deep-time feeling that Aunt Jane and the Vaughans (missed opportunity to name a 1950s doo-wop group) extend to me, I am equally at home among the plastic tables of the nearby Burger King.
To be an American, I think, you need to vibe with both — the eternal and the disposable, side by side.
“This is a Burger King town.”
— national ad campaign, 1986
In the end, Rhode Island Historical Cemetery North Kingstown №9 is, as all graveyards are, a liminal space. It’s a spiritual cul-de-sac in an actual cul-de-sac. The side of it that doesn’t overlook the Burger King is perched over a highway cut through the landscape long after most of the Vaughans’ passings. The graveyard itself is not far from something (now gone) called — I love this — Devil’s Foot Rock.
The continuing presence of the graves is, if you ponder it, extraordinary unto itself. Decay, after all, is a primary feature of such places. And many 18th- and 19th-century family plots — including that of Jane Adelaid’s brother’s brother-in-law, Capt. Samuel Dyer, just up the road — have been moved en masse in the face of progress.
What is even more extraordinary, though, is that past and present can coexist like this, smushed together, quietly offsetting each other.
Because of our comparatively short history, we aren’t as used to that in America as folks in Europe or Asia are. I find succor in trying to fathom the fact that my great(5)-aunt’s bones have not moved in the time since that Burger King rose and started its flame-broiling activities more than 40 years ago. They sit there and wait — for what they believed to be an eventual resurrection and eternity. And who’s to say that won’t happen?
There is something wonderful about the bones of ancestors born when the nation was just emerging, now bumping up against the modern lowbrowness of Burger King, where sandwich after sandwich and Coke after Coke are served as the Vaughan family of North Kingstown, Rhode Island, waits together for an eternal reward that may or may not eventually be at hand. Burgatory, if you will.
Old graveyards are the cornerstones of the republic. They are pieces of deep time riveted into the landscape. They are the inexorable, methodical clock by which some of our faster-moving clocks — the U.S. 1 traffic clock, the Burger King drive-thru clock, even the get-old-and-die clock — are benchmarked. Those other clocks are, in the grand scheme of things, cheap Rolex knockoffs that will be gone in a blink. The timepiece that governs Rhode Island Historical Cemetery North Kingstown #9 and others like it is different.
It marks a slo-mo creep toward an uncertain future — one connected to a past peopled with new and rising Americans who never could have dreamed that tasty burgers and a side of fried pickle sticks could be there for the taking, if only they could get up and bridge that 100-foot divide between the drive-thru and forever.
I stand next to Jane Adelaid Anthony Vaughan, my hand on the top of her rough-hewn marble stone, and contemplate the drive-thru lane next door.
People move through it at the pace of about one a minute. My long-ago aunt does not move. Reuben Arnold does not move; neither does Lydia (Vaughan) Arnold, his wife. Roby Vaughan does not move. Royal Vaughan, the patriarch, lies silently. Do drivers ever look to their right, see the stones and wonder?
Just as the Hudson River School of painters used the encroaching intervention of humanity to elevate the epic landscapes that inspired them, so, too, does it unfold here: Somehow, the Burger King — fast food, bright colors, now, now, now — accentuates the greys and browns of my ancestors’ final resting place. The progress around the graveyard does not reduce it; instead, it helps to define it, to make it even more special. Plastic and stone. Real time and deep time. Burgers and bones.
Where will I be buried? Near a Chipotle? Across from an Applebee’s? Maybe behind a 7-Eleven or an Advance Auto Parts? Whatever the topography, there will be a day when I, too, enter “deep time” and the world rushes on.
I often try to picture my ancestors in their contexts. Usually I fail — even with the more recent ones whose life’s moments were captured on early film. Our forebears are aliens to us in the end. We are connected by blood and genes and stories, but are sequestered forever thanks to the relentlessness of time.
It is an affecting thing to step into this tiny cemetery and feel fleetingly frozen in history with your ancestors in that little pocket universe. You can see — right there, down at the drive-thru — the moment-to-moment universe that you’re from. But the slower, wider picture is revealed, too, if only for a moment.
I am proud that my people are forever attached to the land that they tilled, lived on and quite possibly loved — even if they missed the opportunity for a freshly made Double Whopper with Cheese. I am glad that I — and my sister before me — found out about this place, came here and stopped to take note. Four decades later, we still are.
With apologies to the long-ago verse-writer, then, I propose an amendment to my Aunt Jane’s quatrain to take into account the events of recent decades, to bring a Burger King, of all things, into the never-ending story:
Prepare for death and follow me.
I know not what next door will be.
I only know that change is nigh.
So behold and see as you pass by.
All material ©2025, Ted Anthony. All rights reserved.
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