On the Edge of a Cliff and Ready to Fly

Only my husband knows this about me. One of my favorite places to go to think
and be quiet is a….wait for it….cemetery.

Now I’m not morbid, and I don’t go there dressed as a goth girl. I just go to cemeteries because I don’t listen to the radio or look at my phone (I think it’s disrespectful); I walk among the stones, looking at the different designs, reading loved ones’ inscriptions, mourning with the families of children lost too soon, and marveling at the care of fresh flowers placed at the headstone of someone who’s been dead for 54 years.

Who has been here to remember someone gone 54 years, when the graves of this person’s contemporaries sit neglected and overgrown? Is it a child, or a grandchild, that remembers this person? Or a grandchild fulfilling a parent’s wish to keep the grave maintained? Is it a distant relative, that just found this person on findagrave.com, and as they snapped grave photos to add to the site, they paid respects with fresh flowers?

There are gravestones that look like any other. Pink marble, red marble, gray marble Black gravestones seem to be in fashion right now; black with laser etching of sayings, ranging from “gone fishin’ ” to “Asleep in Jesus” to “We miss you Mama.” These black, shiny, laser stones also tend to have a special photo etched into it – a rainbow trout, detailed praying hands, or a life-like photo from a wedding day.

Where as graves from 20′s, 30′s, look as if the family members were charged by the letter. “Bby Smith. dau. of Wm & Sa” or 1 large tombstone proclaiming “Johnson” with little tombstones nearly
swallowed by the earth, proclaiming, simply, “Mother” “Daughter” “Father” “Son”.