Crumbles

I spend a good deal of time in cemeteries, especially spring and summer. I volunteer to take photographs of headstones, for genealogy purposes, for those researching their family but who don't live near the burial site. A grave marker can be an important factor for documenting relationships, birth dates, and death dates. For some people, a photo serves as a remembrance of a loved one, a distant relative, or a previously unknown ancestor.

No matter what type, markers are the last tangible evidence of a life lived, the last footprint, the dwindling end of the thread created by each of us. Markers may be grand: marble obelisks, hulking granite monoliths, family groupings in an elite neighborhood of the cemetery, even modernistic machined-aluminum with shining swirls and gleaming surfaces. Flourishes of scrolls, flowers, poems, symbols of lifetime hobbies, or laser-etched portraits of the deceased may decorate front and back.

On the other end of that spectrum, I've come across stones that were clearly hand-made, probably by family members who couldn't afford anything else. Sometimes they're concrete or aggregate with lots of little pebbles, shells, and what look like clinkers in the mix. The name, maybe formed by a shaking hand clutching a stick, is often the last act of love from those left behind. I've seen memorials cobbled together from pieces of metal, rough and rusting, built with hope to withstand the elements for as long as possible.When I see a handcrafted memorial, I usually photograph it because I want to take the time to acknowledge it and document it. The families who made these poor grave stones have probably been gone for decades, if not more than a century or two. Perhaps they have no living descendants, or those living now have no memory of them. But at the time of their death, family or friends did what they could to mark that person's passing. And that matters.

Of these crude markers, many get right to the point: name and date. Finished. Others, with crabbed lines of a poem, betray heart-wrenching sadness so great one senses it was all they could do to write anything at all. I found a roughly-shaped, poured concrete rectangle that said, "Billy." Nothing else. Just "Billy." This marker struck me more deeply than the most expensive monument.

Some cemeteries, once pristine and oft-visited, are now forgotten. They're being absorbed into the forest, overtaken by periwinkle vines, nettles, and wild blackberry. Some sink into the earth, bit by bit, being digested by nature: remains, stones, and all. Or they lie hidden beneath a brush pile in a farmer's field, no longer visible and reduced by time to an area to be plowed around.

I guess I hope that Billy, and others who are buried with these poignant home-made stones, know they've been thought of, even though by people with no idea who they were in life. And if they do know, I wonder what those who were buried in a cemetery I visited a few summers ago would think about the fate of the symbol of their last spot on Earth. The bucolic solitude of Lost Grove Cemetery was suddenly disrupted by a late season tornado. It's an old cemetery, with headstones from the early 1800s up to the 1960s when burials ceased. The southern portion was hit hardest with stones scattered about the grass like wooden blocks left out by a child after playtime.

Huge stones had been lifted from their plinths and jammed several feet into the earth at awkward angles. Graceful obelisks were toppled, some broken into sections. Several rows of stones were lying in the grass, all neatly lined up. In some cases though, heavy stones collapsed onto their neighbors which often damaged and sometimes utterly crushed the adjacent marker. All that remained of one small, very old stone was a pile of limestone dust with a few chips scattered around, flung outward as the great weight descended directly on top of it. Along the road, there is a Victorian mausoleum in brick and stone framed by evergreens. Four of the trees had their bark stripped, like peeled bananas, and the trunk snapped off midway. The debris from the trees was bundled into a wild, tangled pretzel and deposited in a pile. The mausoleum lost its decorative corners and carved stones that had been in place for 115 years.

I was there to search for two stones from one family but was met with this destruction. What now? Hopefully, when I visit it again this summer, the little cemetery will be set back to rights as near as can be. I'll search for those stones, but if they were part of those that were pulverized, their symbol of remembrance, their last representation is gone forever. I hope they know someone in their family has searched for them and values their last bit of thread in this world.