Graveyards are traditionally morbid places, but on this sunny morning in July, Lake Mary’s cemetery was green and sunny with only a hint of solemness… a peaceful place rather than grim.
Not many twenty-somethings have thought about their own deaths. From an earthly, purely materialistic standpoint, I think many of us are badly prepared. For instance, I have life insurance but no clue who I named beneficiary. It costs about a thousand dollars to write a will and the cost deterred me from doing that at all. My affairs are not in order. Like most my age, I’m banking on having some warning before I die.
But I’ve given thought to being buried. I know I want to be buried in America, in a cemetery plot with a real headstone that will last until it doesn’t and the schoolkids come with paper and crayons to see if they can trace the letters. I want it to be an old cemetery where the caretaker may or may not be attentive and long grass decorates the stones more often than roses. And I want there to be trees, trees shaped like upside-down hearts making the cemetery green in the summer and stark in the winter, strong and stubborn reminders that lives come and go like seasons. After all, lives are beautiful only for a time and then fade into frail skeletons of what they were.
I remember seeing huge mausoleums in a military graveyard in New York and thinking that no matter how large your tombstone or how much honor it affords, it doesn’t make you immortal. The material world necessarily fades and our bodies with it. People were not meant to be immortal on this earth, and forces like aging, weathering, and root growth ensure that we run our course as we’re supposed to. Even when our remains are put into a grave, a grave can also be destroyed in a flood or earthquake. We are a vapor. A casket and block of granite won’t help.
A cemetery, then, is just a final statement, a way to prolong the inevitable fade. I think on some level we all know this and have to find our ways to make peace with it. When I explore graveyards, I look at the names on tombstones but also at the natural elements: grass, sky, trees, flowers. I remember my own mortality and know that name on the tombstone may be my own… but I also know that’s okay. It’s the nature of things, it’s as natural as the passing of the seasons. And I don’t mind that I am mortal.
~ The Dauntless Princess ~
