Graveyard Moments

About a year ago today, I read Neil Gaiman's The Graveyard Book. It's a strange but enchanting story about a boy who was raised by ghosts in a graveyard after his family was murdered. It's a rather sad tale, really. A story about being alone, longing to fit in and searching for something (or someone). It's also about loving and losing, letting go and moving on.

It must have been an aftereffect of reading The Graveyard Book that, for some reason, I found myself wanting to linger a bit longer at the cemetery on All Saints' Day. I wondered how old our town cemetery was and what kind of secrets its tombs held.

Somehow, the ghost characters in the book reminded me that the corpses buried in those tombs were once "real" people who laughed and cried, sang and danced, breathed and lived. Yet no matter how much they were loved or hated, no matter how much their death was mourned over, their memory fades as the years pass. In time, their graves and tomb markers are all that will remain, reminding the living that -- for a short while -- so and so once walked on this earth.

In about a week, on All Saints' Day, I will be going back to that cemetery. The old headstones with now-familiar names are bound to be there still. But for sure, there will be fresh ones on which new names are engraved. I hope I remember to mention those names in a whispered prayer as I pass by. And I hope you do, too -- in memory of our fellow travelers, who just happened to have gone on ahead of us.

Go to Graveyard Moments, Too