My Sunday Afternoon Drive
What do I do when I’ve got to take the oldest to the next town over for a church function and have 2 kiddos in the backseat asleep and they really need a nap and I need some peace and quiet? I kept driving, of course, and happen to make my way to the cemetery. A person can learn a lot, or at least be given a lot to ponder, from a slow drive through a cemetery.
My first stop is always my grandma and great-grandma’s plots. What legacies they both left! My grandma’s tombstone has a piano carved into it. She played the piano for church most of her life. I can still hear the music flowing out the windows of the old church in the middle of town, the same church I was baptized and married in. And my great-grandma who celebrated her 100th birthday last February and died just a little over a month later. I could have talked to her for days about the happenings in her life. The world and our family benefitted from their kindness and intellect and I look forward to seeing them again.
As I drive up and down the rows, I notice that there are at least a handful of babies buried in my town’s small cemetery, most with stones dating in the early 1900’s. I can almost picture the funeral crowd walking up the grassy hill and the tears pouring from the parents’ eyes who now lie right next to them. How many thousands of tears flooded the grass as they laid their precious child that was only weeks or months old in the ground over a hundred years ago? There’s one set of parents who have 2 different aged babes buried next to them. What sickness or accident took these babes so early? I can’t imagine the hardships our ancestors went through. I am fascinated by the oldest graves, though. To think of how their lives were so different from my family’s as we live in this same spot on Earth.
Then, there is a war veteran who was 20 when WWII took his life. I don’t want to imagine what his last moments as he died for his country were like or his mother’s thoughts as she buried her child. What was his childhood like here in my town before he was shipped off to a war that he was too young and innocent to die for, but he did? I’m grateful for his sacrifice, even though I wish it wouldn’t have happened.
And the 19 year old wife in the 1920’s. Did she die in childbirth? Some sort of accident? Did she contract an infection not long after her wedding day?
It makes me wonder. It makes me sad. But it makes me glad of the reminder that the little dash between the dates on our tombstones isn’t all that there is. Us going back to the dirt isn’t the end, and that is one reason why a trip to the cemetery is not too depressing, but rather fascinating to me.
Maybe I’m morbid or crazy or weird. Yeah, probably, but I enjoyed my step into the past. What did you do with your Sunday afternoon?
