My in-laws are cemetery groupies. To the nth. My MIL buys blankets of evergreen so the dead people won’t get cold in the winter. There is an eternal flame at my nephew’s gravesite (and a bench designed to hold the ashes of other dead people in the legs). The family will jog 9 miles to the graveyard and then have lunch with the dead family members. They clean up the graves, change out flowers, etc., on a regular basis.
My wife and I both have family cemetaries and we make it a point to visit them whenever we are in the area. We clean off tombstones, plant a few flowers etc.
The only close relative I have who’s died is my father, who’s buried in a wall crypt at the Catholic cemetery in my hometown. To tell the truth, I haven’t visited his grave since the funeral. I don’t live there anymore, and when I visit I don’t generally have the time to do side-trips like that.
And besides…he’s not there. The stuff that’s in that crypt is not him. I do him more honor and respect by remembering him alive than I do by visiting him dead. That doesn’t mean I don’t let my mother THINK I’ve been visiting the crypt when I’m in town…she’d have problems with my attitude toward the whole thing.
Ironically my best friend walked to our local cemetery yesterday to visit her Gran. She finds it very peaceful there.
I haven’t visited my mom’s grave, either. It’s depressing. I prefer to remember her in my mind. That place has nothing to do with who she was and I don’t need a “place” to bring the memories to the forefront of my mind.
My mom is in the basement and I don’t go visit her. I’m not even sure why I got the bigger urn when a couple of the smaller ones would do.
I do visit cemeteries, but 99% is for genealogical work. When my grandmother died 15 years ago I never went back until recently. However, my ex in-laws used to go and would ask why I wouldn’t go. Now I’ve been by a few times, and I’ve started taking flowers and such, and when I go looking for other family members graves I take some flowers as well.
There’s a family plot in the middle of the woods that’s totally falling apart and I’d like to clean it up. By now if you didn’t know it was a cemetery then you could walk right through it. Does anyone know the laws on fixing up a cemetery that’s not on my land in Maryland?
We have a wonderful cemetary and arboretum in Cincinnati, Spring Grove, that I will visit on occasion to walk around and admire the gardens while my wife takes pictures. It’s incredibly beautiful, and many times people will come get their wedding pics done there.
This is a timely post as well. My daughter and a friend took a stroll through a local cemetary on Saturday, and found the grave of one of our small town’s founders and a few other things of interest.
I agree with this sentiment. The cemetery where I will be buried is out in the country, so when I visit it’s planned. But if it was in town I’d like to be able to pass through casually, maybe sit and rest while out jogging or exercising.
The cemetery where I will go has had burials since the 1870’s. There are relatives from three family branches, all on my mother’s side there. My body will go beside that of my great-grandmother, a woman I just barely remember(she died when I was seven.)
I love the old graves, as they are more interesting. Some have little carved lambs on top of the stone, to indicate the grave of a child. One young man, who died at the age of sixteen, was named R.E. Lee Woody. Care to guess who he was named for? You’d probably be right, as his father, buried nearby, is the only Confederate veteran in the place.
And I always leave a flower on the grave of a young woman named Amanda Owen. Her grave is one of the earliest, as she died at the age of twenty in 1879. There is a carving of clasped hands on the stone, and the inscription “Amanda, you have gone from me but are not forgotten.” I can’t find anyone else named Owen in the cemetery, so my guess is she was a young wife who died, maybe in childbirth. The young husband wouldn’t be thinking he’d probably marry again. So if he did he’s elsewhere. I’ll never know of course, but I tend the grave along with those of the families, as it makes me vaguely sad for the deceased.
There is a family cemetery that “Gawd is my witness” I will find, but haven’t yet. It’s apparently in the middle of the woods down a sequence of dirt roads and I’ve never been able to get more precise directions from the old timers who’ve been there than “turn right in there somewhere and you go to where the house that used to be blue is” type stuff. The most recent burial I’ve found a record is 1916, but there are at least a couple of dozen people interred there, several of them my ancestors and all of them relatives.
Due to corruption with road contracts in the 1950s and 1960s Alabama is famous for having paved roads where other states wouldn’t even have a chicken path (including roads to nowhere), but this is the one exception evidently- total Dukes of Hazzard backroads where “County Road 22” is an unpaved mess that somewhere along the line becomes “County Road 18” and off which is a “don’t blink or you’ll miss it” path that becomes “Miss Lizzie Bell Road”, etc., and while there used to be a couple of very large plantations there now most of the houses and trailers are abandoned and the ones that are occupied are exclusively black owned.
One day I set off on one of my four failed attempts to find the place. A car behind me passes me, the gravel and dust blowing, and then goes ahead of me, turns sideways, and stops in the middle of the road, forcing me to stop. I can’t see who’s in the car but there are dogs, and it’s a very bad area to turn around because it’s a narrow dirt road with steep embankments. I instinctively reached for a pistol that I remembered wasn’t there so I grabbed the blackthorn shillelagh that’s the closest thing to “protective” just in case (and wasn’t there for protection but because I’d been showing friends my new blackthorn shillelagh) when the driver of the other car, a smallish 60-ish black lady, who seems to be the only person in the car though her dogs are going wild, comes to my window and demands to know “Who are you looking for?” in a voice more demanding and ominous than you’d think a smallish 60ish country lady is capable of mustering.
I tell her the truth: “I’m looking for a cemetery.”
“Which one?”
"Deramus-Rawlinson… "
“My husband’s a Rawlinson…”
Ooh, great… Always nice for a white southerner with a stick to bring up slavery days to an already pissed off black lady with angry dogs.
“This was my grandfather’s family. it’s supposed to be off of one of these side roads…”
“Ain’t no cemeteries in these woods that’s been used in a hundred years.”
“That’s one I’m looking for… it’s some family research I’m doing.”
I’m worried that she’s going to ‘release the hounds’ but she suddenly just turns into the friendliest and most obliging lady you could meet. “Oh okay… yeah… I think I know the one you’re talking about but it’s been a while since I been there… I think you go down Miss Lizzie Road then when it starts to turn the second time you park there it’s gone be off in the woods maybe 200, 300 paces… overgrown by kudzu this time of year though…” and was truly helpful. Then a comment that I’ve quoted many times since:
“Sorry if I seemed rude. I’m part of the Neighborhood White Watch.”
“The what watch?”
“The Neighborhood White Watch. When we see white people down these roads they ain’t usually lookin’ for dead white folks but for live black folks and it ain’t never for nothin’ good. But I understand wantin’ to see your peoples.”
I told her the truth- that I grew up on dirt roads in the country and frankly my family would probably have done the same thing. Uninvited white people coming down the dirt roads to our place never meant good news, just that some of them were either stupid, brave, or hadn’t heard of my mother.
So I didn’t look for the cemetery that day because there was a kudzu. I’ve been there a couple more times in fall and winter but I can’t find the damned thing (I know it’s there, but there are no directions [the problem is there are at least 3 ‘Deramus-Rawlinson’ cemeteries because they were both huge families that intermarried for centuries and the directions in sources are often a mish-mash], and each time a member of the White Watch has stopped me. Last time it was an old man who said “I’d be glad to show it to you but I’ll be damned if I can remember where it’s at- I’ve lived on these roads 50 years and even I get lost on 'em. Besides, it’s turkey season so you don’t wanna be wandering around these woods without wearing bright orange.”
Just a thought, but these things are often easier to spot from the air, so have you tried using Google Earth?
I have actually. Too many trees unfortunately.
I leave flowers on the grave of one aunt on her birthday every year. Other than that, no.
My mom used to refer to Memorial Day as “Decoration Day”. I’ve never heard the phrase from anyone else until today.
Of course they do.
In the middle of the night. These are kids, and they want to get stoned or laid.
I worked at a funeral home, and when I got off at 9:00 pm the funeral home’s gardener–who was also the night watchman for the huge cemetery at the end of Piedmont Ave. in Oakland–would call me up and say, “Hey you wanna get a pizza and drive around the cemetery?”
His job primarily was to chase away night-time intruders, but because they were just kids getting high or making out, he didn’t really care that much. Still, if someone were caught in the headlights, they would be pursued.
Usually I just wanted to get back to my apartment on College, but really you can’t turn down an offer of free pizza and a late-night drive through one of the largest cemeteries in the area.
One day on vacation I went to take pictures there. I found out that there were tombstones from the 19th century that had simply been ignored as erosion on one side of the cemetery increased, largely because of an adjoining street that made maintenance difficult. There was one that said, “Rose-The Flower of My Life.” She’d lived from 1895 to 1896. Apparently, if no one pays, no one cares. All of Rose’s family or friends obviously have died off. So who cares about her headstone?
For my grandmother’s town, I’m pretty sure it was later in the season, actual summertime, but it was a fairly formal occasion. Decoration Day was a public event, although not a local holiday, so I guess they held it on a weekend day. The whole town would turn out. This was in the Ozarks. One old cemetery way outside of town dated back at least to the 1830s, true hillbilly pioneers, and they bore the names of my ancestors.
I wonder if referring to Memorial day as Decoration Day had to do with decorating servicemens’ graves.
When I was in high school, we had this schtick where about four of us would bring a victim along to cruise the cemetery at night. Once we were deep inside, one of us would pretend to see something odd, then another of us would suddenly see it and become a little alarmed, and then all of us would scream: “Oh Shit! Oh My God, No!” shut off the car, turn off the lights and all of us leap out and RUN, all of this happening in a matter of seconds, leaving the victim alone in the dark.
hehehe
I don’t visit cemeteries often but there is a special little cemetery next to a church downtown. It’s surrounded by other buildings and blends in well with the cityscape which makes it easy to just sit down at the benches they have there and relax. It’s a very peaceful area, even with the cars driving by.
Some of the tomb stones are quite old, from the early 1800’s even. But most of those are so worn off that they can’t be read. A lot of the tomb stones have been pushed aside by growing trees or even completely covered up by the soil over time. Everytime I go it’s still quite interesting… And very relaxing.
I did similar things. Yes, it’s a little cruel.
Actually, what I did was much crueler. But the “victim” laughed at the end
[Getting back to OP]
In some communities, “communing with the dead” by way of visiting a grave site and giving offerings to the deceased is pretty common and built into the calendars of many countries. Like in Mexico, Korea or Japan. I think Korean “Thanksgiving” is essentially a grave visiting occasion, as well as January 1st.
But as for the US, I wouldn’t be surprised if more visitors to cemeteries were simply using them as a kind of park to walk their dogs.
That was the saddest part of when I went to visit Pere Lachaise… seeing the huge, once impressive tombs and vaults being decayed. 
I’ve heard the saying that people really die when they’re forgotten. Well, the rests in those vaults were really dead, as nobody had tended to their graves in quite a long time.
Which is a way of how I see people visiting graves. Doing something that actively reminds them of their deceased and brings back their memories.
I was always curious about those burail vaults. There are several in the old cemetary near where I used to live-they date from the 179’s. They are mouns on the side of a hill, with a garnite block facing, and an old worugt iron door (securely locked), witha rusty old padlock. Clearly most of these haven’t been entered in over 100 years. What are they like inside? did they just lay the bodies out on a shelf?
I have always wonderd what people left inside these thins-were they like egyptians, leaving food, houshold stuff?