Post by Joanna on Oct 18, 2015 0:46:35 GMT -5
Morning in the Cemetery
MERIDIAN, Miss. – I often write about Rose Hill Cemetery – Meridian’s local Victorian-age cemetery – but today I have another cemetery in mind and on my heart. It’s a family cemetery where my burial plots, plus my husband, two sons and daughters-in-law are located. Several years ago our oldest son made the plot selections, just as I made the ones for momma and daddy in the 1980s – sort of a family duty, I suppose.
These days as we live life too fast, not enjoying those fleeting moments of the thing we call life. Maybe one day my family and I can visit in the cemetery and not on the green side. Geez – that’s morbid, but something to thing about. Of course I know we will not be there, not really. Praise God!
Yes, it was just this morning my last direct descendent from my mother’s generation was laid to rest. Now I am truly old, but quickly I must add – age is only a number, albeit a rather large one, at this point. As I gazed across the cemetery, I tried to think profound thoughts. You know something like Colonel Sanders said, “There’s no reason to be the richest man/woman in the cemetery. You can’t do any business from there.” But then I remembered what Granny said when she reached 89 years of age, “Everybody I know is dead.” Now that was profound, however, she was talking to a living, breathing me, at the time. However I could hear the longing she had to join the others, although she never voiced it.
I read where one woman had engraved on her stone: “I told you I was sick.” But I had rather remember one of my favorite writers, Erma Bombeck, when she wrote her thoughts:
I would never have insisted the car windows be rolled up on a summer day because my hair had just been teased and sprayed.
I would have eaten less cottage cheese and more ice cream.
I would have burned the pink candle that was sculptured like a rose before it melted while being stored.
When my child kissed me impetuously, I would have never said, “Later. Now get washed up for dinner.
When spouting cemetery thoughts, one must not forget the famous poets of our world. Percy Shelley wrote, “It might make one in love with death, to think that one shall be buried in so sweet a place.” He penned this sentiment shortly before his own death.
And then there is a favorite bereavement poem:
Do not stand at my grave and weep,
I am not there. I do not sleep.
I am the thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glints in the snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumn rain.
As you wake with morning’s hush
I am the swift up-flinging-rush
of quiet birds in circling flight.
Do not stand at my grave and cry.
I am not there. I did not die.
– Mary Frye, 1932
So my morning was spent in the cemetery, where I met my own mortality, once again. I thought of Granny and her own simple logic that was, perhaps, more profound that the greatest of poets. I realized that, yes, I am now a proud member of the older generation and that’s a good thing. But the most important thoughts I had in the cemetery – we are all on a journey, we are pilgrims traveling together, some in the lead and some follow. “And in the sweet by and by we will meet on that beautiful shore.” This I believe as I walked the cemetery this morning.
Source: Annie McKee, The Meridian Star, October 16, 2015.