I grew up in cemeteries. They were part of our education, recreation and, too often, conversation.
As a child, my grandmother spread a tablecloth over a grave slab for our picnic. We battled the ants for our deviled eggs served atop our more stable kin.
My mother saw to it that we visited the cemeteries where important men are buried: Confederate generals, distant relatives and Hank Williams. It wasn’t a successful outing unless a cemetery was involved.
Cemetery importance did not diminish after childhood. My late husband, a journalism professor, routinely told his students that if they could spell “cemetery,” they’d get a job. I know from personal experience the word was on the spelling test for employment at the Memphis, Tennessee, newspaper, along with “lightning” and “inoculation.”
My parents planned their burial spots in detail when they were still relatively young. Whenever I’d come home for a visit, we’d sit for hours as they rehashed the minutia of lot sizes, placement and tombstone wording.
Once, when I was between husbands, they offered me a marker beside them as my Christmas present. They only thing I’d have to supply was a death date.
I declined.
My favorite all-time cemetery is in Cross Creek, Fla., where the writer Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings is buried. The year I visited, the remote site was following that ashes-to-ashes formula that perpetual care contradicts. The swampy place seemed to be taking care of itself.
My husband Hines and I were having a recent, late-night, ipso facto, animated, discussion about cemeteries. I was taking the rather indefensible position that too much is made of grooming ghosts, that we should scrub and rake and prune where the living live, not where the dead are lying. Give your artificial flowers to the living, and all of that.
Hines was having none of it. He quickly noted how much I love walking the grounds of Pere Lachaise in Paris, stumbling across the tombs of Chopin and Piaf, not to mention Jim Morrison. And he reminded me how I try to visit Hank’s gravesite once a year, and that I’m as fond of strolling through fascinating old cemeteries as the next person. How would I be able to do that if someone weren’t taking care of business?
And, he said in his most authoritative voice, cemeteries are for the living, to give solace and space for rumination — not to mention picnics. The living, then, must tend them.
He won the immediate argument, though I’m still not convinced that there’s physical room on this old earth for everyone to have a tomb like Grant, Napoleon or even Marjorie Rawlings. We must evolve in death as in life. Cremation is to burial what birds are to fish.
I for one volunteer to forgo the “fancy filigree” that Lucinda Williams sings about when she advises against spending money on a funeral that could put “cover on the bed.”
I’d rather be scattered about some swamp, or maybe the Gulf of Mexico when the wind is seaward. That will save my niece the trouble of trimming the privet.
The Dispatch Editorial Board is made up of publisher Peter Imes, columnist Slim Smith, managing editor Zack Plair and senior newsroom staff.
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