I have visited the graves of my grandparents. They are in a very obscure Jewish cemetery about an hour north of Montreal. (It’s hidden among some chicken farms.)
Ed
It’s interesting how graves can tell a story. Where my father’s buried (rural cemetery with graves dating from late 19th century to present) there’s a married couple whose exact dates I don’t remember the exact inscriptions (I have pics somewhere), but let’s say
Claude Ruffin 1860-1931
Margaret Hooper Ruffin 1870-1942
and then to the sides of both parents and in two lines were, no exaggeration, about 10 little graves, all marked “Infant son of Claude & Margaret Ruffin” or “Infant daughter of Claude & Margaret Ruffin” with “Born & Died” and the dates, which were something like 1891, 1893, 1895, 1896, 1898, 1900, etc.- hardly a 2 year period for 20 years without one.
A short distance away was the grave of a woman and her husband and her own grave was inscribed “Emily Ruffin Vicks 1899-1958, beloved wife of Julius Vicks, beloved daughter of Claude and Margaret Ruffin”. The odd thing is that while I never heard of this family, and while all of them died long before I was born (generations before in the case of the infants), and I have no idea whether they were good/bad/average people, I remember thinking “Thank God, they had at least one who made it”.
Sometimes the tombstones literally tell stories. In the same cemetery there are a husband and wife buried whose graves have the inscription “Murdered in his/her sleep on the night of July 21, 1898, by two cowardly Negro burglars who were dealt with by their friends”. That one was chilling for several reasons, one being that I’d heard about how their friends “dealt with” the “cowardly Negro burglars” (one of them’s skeleton wound up in my great-aunts’ house for a time when they rented the back room to a doctor for his ‘field office’ [doctors would sometimes ride a circuit through the backwoods and rent a room somewhere for patients to come see them as coming into town would take several hours at a minimum]; it was later [long before I was born, but my father remembered it] returned to the family of the man for burial). An odd one on my great-great-grandmother’s grave is “Her two precious infant sons, Thomas Z. and Thomas J., are buried close to her”, but their graves are unmarked. It made me wonder if they didn’t know where. (The two boys would have died 25 years or so before their mother.)
Then there’s the iconography- Confederate, Masonic, Navy, other. Or just the little blips about people (“Born in Rome, Italy 1899”- odd to see in a backwoods Bama cemetery- I’m guessing a WWI bride). And some of the tombstones are gorgeous: one of my favorites is a carved marble cylindrical one that’s a fluted classical column at the base but morphs into a dead tree trunk by the top. In one of the cemeteries I visit there’s a life sized marble statue of a woman holding a scroll with the lady’s name and dates inscribed; her husband, who died years later, is next to her in a still grand but not as grand tomb. As a matter of curiosity I looked them up on ancestry.com (their surname was one of mine- distant cousins)- and learned they were wealthy by the standards of their time ($50,000 in 1870- a fortune for the post-war years) and childless, so she was evidently all he had and worth paying what had to be a fortune for that statue, which I’ve wondered if it was an actual sculpture of her. (I’ve seen turn of the century advertisements for sculptors to come and make a “from life” funereal sculpture or who would do one from photos and description- it was around $750 up.)
The infuriating thing with “Alonza” (the statue above) is that she was vandalized- a few years ago by local tiny town terrors who were actually caught red handed, but, being from indigent families, there was nothing that could be done other than to incarcerate them briefly. Since the estate was closed a century ago there’s no money from the estate and the tiny town doesn’t have the small fortune to repair it, she’s just missing an arm (well, not missing, it’s still there, but it’s now housed in a local church for safekeeping).
For the record (bad pun), there’s a blues called “Decoration Day,” sung by Sonny Boy Williamson I (John Lee Williamson). And he recorded the song twice, so there’s “Decoration Day No. 2.” :eek:
I don’t visit as often as I used to, but instead put up a memorial on FindaGrave.com. I put more flowers on there instead of putting flowers on their grave.
Oh, yes - every time I’m in town. I don’t get to my home town very often, and every visit involves at least one round of visiting the farm I grew up on and looking for the tree they planted when my brother died, and also a trip to the ‘Memorial Gardens’. On the one hand, it’s a pretty strange thing to do, going places you know will make you cry. On the other, it’s a real focus for me to be able to explore my memories of all these people. There aren’t many people left with whom I can share the stories, so it’s important to have places to keep those memories fresh.
It might be different if I still lived there, or if everyone happened to be buried where I live rather than where we all lived at one time. But all my friends understand that while I’m there to see them, too, I have to spend some time revisiting the past.
One visit I remember in particular was after my Dad died. I was staying in a hotel on the edge of town, and I went out for my morning jog. I asked at the desk how far the cemetery was, thinking it was about 10km round trip. It was 10km one way - still, once you’ve gone that far, not much to do but push on. I spent quite a bit of time at each of our graves, and then turned to make the jog back to the hotel. I looked back for one last time, and discovered I had left a hand print in the frost on each of my sister’s, brother’s, mother’s and father’s grave - they all looked like the kind of Valentine’s Day hearts you make in the third grade.
A disadvantage of these modern cemeteries with the flat bronze markers flush to the ground is you can never find anybody in winter. I’ve learned the trick - if you send flowers to the graves about a week before you plan to visit, the guys who run the place will find the markers with a metal detector and a map, and they’ll pull up the urn and put the flowers in. But there have been lots of times when I’ve been standing in a snowdrift looking at a flat field of snow and saying in my head “Okay, I know you’re all down there somewhere…”
My father was a real cemetary-visiting freak - we always went to at least one wherever in the country we were visiting relatives at or vacationing near. When my family visited relatives in the LA-area back in the 60’s we went to Forest Lawn. My memories of it was that it was kinda sterile, cold, and over-the-top all at the same time. Some of my favorites, though, was the HUGE cemetary in the Baraboo, Wisconsin area where the Ringling Brother’s Circus family monuments are. The grounds themselves were lovely (at least they were in the '70s when I last went there) with neatly maintained green, rolling lawns and clean white sculptured monuments. A sweet, old Polish cemetary in Greenfield, WI has many headstones with photos on them of the person interred there. My father said people would get dressed up and have their picture taken for the specific purpose of it eventually being attached to their stone after they’d passed. (And I LOVE that southern black expression, “passed”. It is such a peaceful acceptance of what we’re all eventually going to experience.) Anyway, sometimes the photo on the headstone would be of a mother and baby in a coffin together. Those always made me saddest.
Sadly, my father is buried nearly 200 miles from where I now live and I haven’t visited his grave in more than 10 years. He’d actually picked out the cemetary and where he wanted to be “planted” a few years before he passed. (He always referred to burials as “being planted” and would always say, whenever we drove past a cemetary where a grave was being dug, “Look! They’re gettin’ ready to plant another one!”) Maybe making a joke was his way of accepting hiw own ultimate eventuality. His cemetary is full of those East Texas tall pine trees , most of which have all kinds of wind chimes in them. Presumably friends and relatives of those “planted” there hang chimes as they wish, with the blessing and acceptance of the cemetary owners.
A little girl is buried a few graves over from my father and her grandparents, for many years, were frequent visitors to her plot. They’d leave the usual token of flowers but most touching were the little toys, dolls, and teddies as well. (We figured it was the grandparents leaving the gifts as the headstone mentioned something about her being a beloved and only granddaughter - or something like that. Knowing this caused us to pose different scenarios as to why the child’s parents weren’t mentioned…)
Once while driving alone near Newport, RI I found a pre-revolutionary war cemetary, with those weather-worn stones and hard-to-decipher dates and names, and demarcated with those ubiquitous grey slate stone walls found here and there all over New England. When I tried to find the cemetary later I couldn’t, even after hours of searching. Made me wonder if maybe it wasn’t magical and only appeared periodically, like Brigadoon…
I thing visiting cemetaries has become a thing of the past, like so much else, in this new age. We’re too busy trying to move forward and are forgetting to look back.