Whistling Past The
Graveyard

Most people consider me a little unusual when it comes to funerals. Like a lot of people, I don’t like them, and I always tell people not to take it personal if I don’t go to their funeral. I tell them that I just don’t do funerals. I have been to a few of direct family members, but over the years I can count the number of funerals I’ve attended on one hand. I still will go for visitation and pay my respects, but seldom do I attend the actual funeral.

But as much as I dislike funerals, I love cemeteries. This is especially true for older cemeteries. There’s so much history there, and oh the stories you can hear, if you can just fine tune your hearing. You can look around at the head stones and just hear their unusual stories. I visited one historic cemetery and just wondered how devastated a mother must have been when she had three children die on three consecutive days. Not only did she have to deal with three deaths so close to each other, they were her children and your children are not supposed to die ahead of you. If you lose a spouse, you’re a widow or widower, and if you lose your parents, you’re an orphan. But there’s no label when you lose your children, perhaps because it’s a concept that’s so foreign to the rhythmic cycle of life that society hasn’t been able to apply a name to it. And just how long do you think it took for that hole in her heart to heal? It may have not completely been able to heal until her death eight years later.

And I’ve seen husband and wife die within days of each other and wonder if it was because of injuries from a shared accident or if the remaining spouse just couldn’t heal their broken heart after the other one died. And sometimes there are a number of years between their deaths, but you wonder about the quality of those remaining years, especially if most of that time was spent in grieving their loss. I’ve visited other cemeteries where veterans are buried that have given their lives in wars dating back to the Civil War and wonder if I had been born in that time would I have suffered a similar fate. Each grave represents a life, and all that life represented.

As I was visiting the cemetery where my daughters are buried the other day, I looked around at some of the graves as I often do and was reminded that change takes place even here. Gone are the traditional head stones that used to mark graves in most older cemeteries. In their place are flat markers that are easier for the maintenance crew to maintain. But as I was looking around I noticed that the new markers no longer use one of the most important symbols found on the older styles.

Most of us are familiar with the style that lists the date of birth with a dash or hyphen followed by the date of death, and it’s that dash or hyphen that got me to thinking one day. I call it a dash even though on a head stone that symbol may have its own name. And if it doesn’t then maybe it should, because it represents a great deal if you think about it. That dash represents that person’s entire life. For some that line represents few events because their life was short, maybe even days, but for the average person it represents an almost limitless number of points along that line that correspond to an equal number of life experiences. It would be great to be able to see that life under a microscope and be able to draw out a specific slice and see how that event shaped their character or defined their existence.

In our Southern culture we don’t always deal well with death, but it’s always there. Sometimes it’s a tragedy and sometimes it’s simply a mystery, part of a natural rhythm or not.