COUNTRY CEMETERIES

While working on a photographic collage recently, I uncovered pictures that I took a decade ago. One 8 by 10, in black and white, shows a broken marble tombstone in an old country graveyard. The name and dates are hard to read. The stone is nearly cracked in two and is lying on the ground at an angle.

I remember the day. A walk with a neighbor overland through cornfields to a now abandoned family burying ground. At the time, the marker caught my eye and tugged at my heart. To this day, I am intrigued by strolling among marble reminders of lives that were. It makes me think about my own life. It had a beginning. It, too, will have an end. There’s no such thing as forever. Sometimes we forget that.

No matter how beautiful the carving. Regardless of the quality of the sculpture. Even if we wish it were not so. One day our life on earth will be done and we will lie beneath our own cold stone. Not long after, our names, too will be largely forgotten.

Sometimes this thought makes me unbearably sad. Once, walking in Concord in a little cemetery on a long-ago Saturday morning, I saw dates that indicated the grave of a small child. That seemed to me to be a life whose flame was too soon extinguished.

At other times the stones are reminders. “Life is precious”. “Don’t wish away today.” “Tomorrow is not guaranteed.” They whisper. When I hear these admonitions, I try to appreciate the beauty in the mundane and look around to see all that this life can offer if I will but take the time to notice.

Once upon a time every family farm had its own burial ground like the one where we walked. The benevolent souls of departed relatives might have been as near as the back wood lot. To me that would be far preferable than being plunked at the end of a row in some manicured city cemetery. I’d far rather take my final rest at the end of the lane beneath the giant oak tree or in the woodsy clearing near the artesian springs where the ground is red clay.

It doesn’t matter much, I suppose. I doubt it’s like OUR TOWN where the ghosts of the dead chat to each other in the still of the night. When we die, reminders of our sojourn here won’t mean much, I believe, as we “fly away” to a new life.