Visiting the Dead

We live close to a Pioneer Cemetery. Although at one time more than 500 people were buried there, most of the gravestones have been removed and the place feels like a park .  Most of the dead are were buried in the mid 1800s; the cemetery closed in 1900. Each time we walk past, Toe wants to go in and look at the gravestones.

We noticed a number of the markers were down or had been broken. We read the epitaphs and talked about the age of people buried there, whether they are buried with their children, if everyone died the same year (and what might have happened). I am always struck by the number of deaths at a young age. If the person survived 60, it was notable. Toe enjoys going there so much that if we walk there on our way someplace, we must also stop on our way back.

Seeing this young child with the memorial markers from people who died more than a hundred years ago is a very odd juxtaposition.

It reminds me of that poem:

Ozymandias
by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

I know Shelley is commenting on how even the powerful fade over time, but I see it in this cemetery of ordinary people. There are great river pilots next to children who died at two. Many of the markers have faded so much they are hard to read. And we, more than a hundred years later, see so little and wonder... And we, too, will be gone in the blink of an eye.

I find the cemetery a pleasant place to visit. Possibly because it is quiet and peaceful. Possibly because it is the great equalizer. Mostly because it somehow feels like it connects us to the past. I think that's what Toe gets out of it when we visit. I know in some countries, people have picnics at their family gravestones, and I see that as kind of beautiful.