Today we are reminded that cemeteries are more than just a place for grieving...An article for In Repose by Lucy Brite.
“Let's take our lunch and go to the cemetery,” I can hear my mother saying on a warm spring morning. If that sounds strange, it wasn't to us children, and all of us looked forward to the outing. I know some people avoid cemeteries, considering them morbid or sad places; thanks to my mother, my family never thought like that.
Since we were babies who could enjoy the warm weather in our portable playpens, through pre-school years when we could bring a doll or board game to play, we felt at home on the gentle grassy slope beside the Live Oak that was the resting place for a large granite monument bearing our family name in deep cut letters, and several smaller markers of white marble placed like pillows at the heads of family members who had gone before. Some of the older stones had dates within range of the Civil War. Their occupants had not seen daylight since the visitors to this cemetery would have worn much different clothing from the shorts my mother worked in, kneeling carefully among their resting places.
There was space not occupied by graves, and we came to know that space would hold the rest of us “someday” when we needed it.
It seemed natural to be there playing in the shade, while our mother and any children who were old enough worked at planting or pruning shrubs, weeding, scrubbing benches or headstones: whatever needed to be done to spruce up the family plot.
She entertained us with occasional stories about those whose graves we were tending, and it felt as if they must look on approvingly at what we were doing to the place.
We did our work in the morning while it was cool, pausing for an occasional drink from the short length of hose Mamma had brought to connect to the nearby spigot. Any plant clippings or pulled weeds we generated were placed neatly in the trash bag we had brought for the purpose.
When she judged we had done enough, we would place the flowers she had cut from out yard in the container braced in its metal stand. (Mamma always used fresh flowers or live plants. Artificial flowers were all right, she said, if you couldn't get out to the cemetery often.) Next we'd wash up in the hose, admire what we had done, and eat our sandwiches on the benches.
Our plot had benches for visitors. Mamma said that Grandmother and Grandfather always offered a visitor a seat, and she made sure that custom continued in their final repose.
There were rules, of course, but mostly they involved staying away from any burial preparations or funeral in progress. Also, we couldn't “run wild and shout,” she explained, because other people who were visiting graves might be disturbed.
We couldn't interfere with the work of the groundskeepers either. Mamma knew the groundskeepers well and talked to them about keeping weedeaters away from her new Liriope edging she was installing, or watering, or the sorry state of our present culture that made it necessary to use poor quality old vases and containers for flowers to keep the good ones from being stolen. It would never have been so in the old days, they all agreed. The groundskeepers loved my mother, and would have agreed with her in any case. They thought she made our plot look nicer than just about anybody's, and appreciated the fact that she and other family members took a personal, hands-on interest.
Mamma was nothing if not hands-on. She could not understand – and said so – why other families who had “able bodied men and big strapping boys” were not out there cleaning up the graves of their ancestors. Ironically, she herself was just a bit over five feet tall and slightly built, but no matter, If we took a stroll through the markers after lunch, she would pause to silently pull an accusatory weed next to a headstone or straighten a pot or vase.
As we got older, school and related activities took up more of our time, and visits to the cemetery were limited to special requests to help Mamma with something heavy or replace a major plant that she couldn't handle. Maybe she wanted to avoid placing us in an awkward position, or somehow setting us apart from our peers.
She needn't have worried. What she gave us with those early childhood visits to family graves was invaluable: a sense of family, of continuity of the past into the present and the future, a respect for the property of others and their privacy. Today most of us can't pass a cemetery, especially an old southern cemetery, without being drawn to visit, even though we know none of our family lies among its graves.
We children all looked forward to helping Mamma tend the family graves. We didn't find it strange or morbid. In fact, those visits to weed and trim and scrub instilled in us a sense of family, of continuity of the past into the present and the future.
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