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[rose]

[META] - changing views on cemeteries?

[konamouse]

And sometimes a visit can bring back memories (both good and bad).

I wasn't looking, but I think that Ariel found me.
Her mother's trial was happening just last month. Here is the verdict.

Anyway, here is her headstone. I paid my respects and it made me feel a little better.

[thunderclap8]

We talked about this some at the Atlanta event today.

Imbri and I agreed that we take the time to look at the tombstones now, rather than at best powering through to the one grave we wanted to visit.

And I personally am much more comfortable with just strolling around them and observing.

[HitsHerMark]

Most of the time, the graveyards I go to, when I go to one, are very very old.

When I visited the UK I knelt down on graves and took rubbings of the brass markers over them. One of which, John D'Aubernon (sp), was the oldest known surviving "military brass".

I have stood on the head of "Oh Rare Ben Johnson", in Westminster Abby. The poor guy couldn't afford a full plot so they interred him standing up. ...Shakespeare might have said that Ben couldn't afford a full plot in any of his plays either. But that's neither here nor there.

Orange County isn't a very old place. And seeing a marker with a person who was born the day after I was, or of a person who died last week gives me pause. People don't go to Harbor Lawn for the historical value excatly. So it's a different vibe altogether. Not that those places weren't solemn, or that I didn't have a concept of where I was when I was sitting on top of ol' John in Surry "rubbing his brass". But, it's a very different vibe.

On top of that, not long after the game started, a family member got very sick and went into the hospital, so the idea of traipsing around a grave yard rather lost it's luster.

But I'm glad that a) I didn't have to go alone. And b) that I did go.

It's okay. I'm okay. And my relative is also okay by the way.

[krystyn]

I've always felt that cemeteries were a nice place to spend a bit of life force - my mom would take me and my brother to St. Adalbert's so she could visit her mother and father. Sometimes, her emotion would overwhelm me and I'd feel that kind of discomfort that one can feel as a kid when confronted with something much bigger than onself, but mostly, it felt good to walk a short distance away and search for pine cones on the ground.

I had to help bury my aunt just about a year ago, and the gravesite her husband and kids chose was right at the edge of the cemetery, looking onto the backyards of some houses, one of which had a couple of black labs running and playing. They thought the dogs would keep her company, and I like that thought.

The two Chicago-specific small favors felt kinda special to me for their own reasons, and I found myself placing a bit of myself at each spot I stopped to take a moment to look and absorb. I dunno, it's hard to explain. Sometimes we were asked to leave tokens or notes or drawings, but many times I left a grave the way it was, but walked away feeling lighter.

It still amazes me how major expressways can run right alongside some of these places, but when you're there, there's nothing but the sound of your own thoughts, your footsteps on the ground, and maybe some birds. Lonely, sad, self-sufficient, orderly, ramshackle, tended-to, final.

[Varin]

I'll admit that I've mostly ignored cemeteries my whole life. Nearly all of the cemeteries I've visited in the last 10 years have been visited because they were artistically or architecturally interesting. My parents have never been the type to visit gravesites and so I was brought up the same way. I've always held the view that the people who died aren't really there at the gravesite so I didn't need to be at a cemetery to "visit" them.

I was talking to Rose in chat about how LCP changed alot of this. When I went to the local cemetery with my daughter for my first round of small favors, I was surprisingly affected. Many of the graves in the back of the cemetery were completely ignored, broken or covered with leaves and dirt. A few of them were so old and weathered you couldn't even read the names. I felt very sad for those people. Looking at other nearby graves with massive holiday-specific decoration displays, I felt sad that these ignored resting places were probably never visited or got as much as a rose placed on their stones.

My daughter and I cleaned off all of the older gravesites and we talked about the people who were buried there. I thought she would be too young to understand at 3, but she showed an amazing amount of understanding and caring.