Cemeteries

As Halloween, All Saints day and All Souls day draw nearer, I find myself thinking more and more about our relationship with the dead.

There's a cemetery behind the small country church named St. Anthony's where my father was raised, and I was baptized. When I was young, when we lived several hours away from there, we would walk through whenever we would come to visit my grandparents. 'That's your great grandmother's grave' my father would say.

When I was seven years old, my father's youngest brother, Lucas, died in a tragic accident. He was only 19, midway through his first year of college. They buried him near the entrance of the cemetery, on a sunny, crisp November day. Visits to my grandparent's house now included a pilgrimage to a flat, red granite gravestone, 'Beloved Son' after every Sunday mass. This was the first time I remember attending a funeral.

When I was in high school, Uncle Jesse, the great uncle with the missing fingers (a much loved family story involving a table saw and an unexpected calmness about missing digits) passed away. He took his place near the back of the cemetery. He was a military veteran in the Navy, so he has the white marble foot stone of a sailor. Instead of the Catholic circle and cross, he has the chalice and cross of a United Presbyterian-- apparently my my great aunt thought it looked nicer.

In college, I received a phone call that my godmother, Aunt Jenny, had lost her battle with breast cancer. I flew home for the funeral in shock-- I knew the cancer had returned, but I hadn't realized how serious the situation was. At the funeral, I didn't recognize the woman in the casket. They buried her in the extension, the newest addition to the parish property. She was the first grave there.

A couple years later, another Great Uncle, Barry, passed. Raised a Protestant, he was given a Catholic funeral and a place near the front walk. His wife survives him.

Last year, my mother became unexpectedly pregnant. My mother is no longer a young woman, and we knew the baby most likely wouldn't be born. She made it two months in my mother's womb, loved by is  all, before quietly leaving us. We had a funeral mass for her, and received permission to bury her in the same grave as my uncle Lucas. It was a clear, beautiful day when we buried her. Seven months pregnant with my daughter, I had to sit on the ground after a few moments.

And this year, Uncle Jessie's wife, Aunt Liz, joined her husband. They still haven't added her date of death to their shared headstone. They were married in 1947.

My parents live down the street from that cemetery now, and it's one of their favorite places to walk. My grandparents still make regular pilgrimage to my uncle's grave. And whenever we visit St. Anthony's for a parish festival or a family event, I always take my children to walk and visit the graves.

Perhaps surprisingly, the cemetery is a friendly place for me. I feel at home there. So many of the graves are people I am connected to by bonds of blood and affection, that walking among the graves feels like attending a family reunion. My history, my sense of who I am and where I come from, is rooted to that cemetery.

It's in the cemetery where the communion of saints has real meaning for me. In the resting place of the dead, I feel very much alive.