Cemeteries

 I take some of my walks at a local cemetery, a large French one with a lot of mid-20th C stones. It is interesting to see what people chose as their final statements - when they could afford to make a statement. Many short scripture verses. Lots of robed statues, usually saints, but sometimes an angel or an abstract like Death or Sorrow.

Because of the recent thaw, there are more graves than usual that have been recently opened. As some are in sections of the cemetery that are not new I get curious what the dates are. Some of the spouses died long ago, one back to 1979 that I saw yesterday.  I used to assume that this meant 45 years of widowhood for one of them and pondered the sadness of that, but we keep good enough track of our relatives of the previous two or three generations now to know that who is buried together is not always an indication of your first guess as to the reality. People remarried, but a double plot and stone had been purchased fifty years before when their first wife died. The second wife is buried in some other place. And sometimes it is clear that people moved away, leaving a birth year of 1897 inscribed but no death year.

It is still jarring to see the wide span of dates between spouses on the stone, and deaths of children recorded before their parents, sometimes long before. Memento mori. Remember that you have to die.  I have a friend who told me, almost fifty years ago now, "You will die on a day just like today."