Graveyards

These two beloved friends, Marc Houseman and Ginger Brickey, taught me to love and appreciate cemeteries, for the opportunity to honor the dead, but also for the sense of closure and affirmation of love, for the beauty and for the serenity.

I did not write today's post. When it was brought to my attention as a post on Facebook, I asked permission of the author to re-post it here. These are not my words, but these are definitely my sentiments exactly. Thank you, Clare Brewer Oldham, for so eloquently stating my feelings about graveyards, and for so graciously allowing me to re-post your words here.
  

What Clare said:

Should it be up for interpretation, graves are not for the dead. They are for the living.

In Los Angeles, a person comes across many "descansos." Small crosses, sometimes with flowers, toys, photographs, at roadsides and intersections. When you see them, you know someone died there.

They are illegal, but that doesn't mean much when someone has died and a person loved them. I assume the cops choose not to do anything about them for that reason. Because you see them everywhere. They are not removed.

My dad never wanted to talk about death in any real way. He would allude to his possible demise, mention what doctors had predicted, but he didn't want to talk about burial versus cremation, or where, or how.

Being me, and intent on making things work the best way they could, trying to plan ahead, I eventually cornered him years ago, demanded that he tell me if he wanted to be buried or cremated. He admitted he wanted to be buried.

I was happy when I heard him say that, not because there is a difference either way after you are dead, but because there is a difference for those left behind. A small plaque on a wall may be just what some families desire. Ashes spread over a beloved ground may be what others desire. For me, I have always loved gravestones.

I have visited cemeteries in South Dakota, California, Oklahoma, Virginia, Colorado, and Paris. Three in Paris. Plus the Catacombs. I am a lover of the dead, in that I love to see their names, to contemplate their lives, even though I do not know them. Since I was young I learned how to do "grave rubbings" with paper and pencil or charcoal. The writing on a gravestone would come out of such a rubbing. It always felt like an homage to a stranger who had become my friend.

I have loved so many people I wish I had known. Small babies, small children, teenage soldiers, poets, singers, philosophers, scientists, wives desolate at the loss of their husbands, husbands eviscerated at the death of their wives. Your heart could nearly burst from seeing such people, stones sticking out of the earth so they are not forgotten.

When I moved to California, I was surprised to see that the majority of graves are not gravestones, the type that says something and sticks out of the earth, but rather "headstones," small plaques implanted in the ground of the deceased. When you see a cemetery here, it looks like a rolling green hill from afar. Even from up close. Again I beat the drum of whatever a family desires for their lost loved one, they should get. I hold no judgement of any way in which a family chooses to honor their loved ones.

But I will say, it is not for me. I have always needed a stone jutting out of the earth. I have always needed to see the name there, worn away perhaps, but visible and tangible. I do not want a cemetery to tell me that it is more appealing (and cheaper) to have a headstone versus a gravestone. See the rolling green hills from the freeway? Don't worry, you will not die. That's what it seems to be telling me. But I love the stark, curved, moss-covered, jutting gravestones--the ones that demand you look at them. Remember them. Take a moment to pause on their names, to see their lifespans, to read their small commentaries. See them rising from the earth as you drive by. Feel, for a moment, your own mortality.

My dad is now buried in a military cemetery. Every stone is the same--not exactly what I had wished or imagined, but good all the same. I desperately need a place where I can come back to him, though he could not come back to me. The military seems to know what I know--you put up a stone, rising from the ground, to show living people the reality of death. Here lie soldiers and heroes, the stones say. They line up, row after row, on the plain. Do not look away. This is what they meant to the world. See them shining at you? Do not look away.

It should be thus, in my opinion, for all people--our lives and deaths are reminders to those that follow. A place to visit and remember. And sometimes your child just wants to feel close to you, again, for a moment--just wants to rest her head on your gravestone, touch the engraving of your name in the marble, know that your body is right beneath her, the body that made her, that held her, that loved her, that left her.

Remember.  That's all I want to do.  Always remember. To be able to sit and talk to him, though I know he is changed. To see my own death, not so far away. For what is time, truly? And to be able to sit and lean against the stone as if it were my father's arms. Because it is the closest I will ever get again to my father's arms.

Me...beside the tombstone of my great-great-grandfather, who is buried in the churchyard of the church he helped build with his own hands in Mitchell Township, Wisconsin.

My dad's stone, here in Southern California. He rests in the shade of a large jacaranda tree that was a tiny baby tree in 1963 when he was buried.