A fine and private place

I recently joined Substack (I encourage you to check it out and subscribe if you like -- my focus there is different than here at Skeptophilia), and a poignant post there got me thinking about graveyards.

I've always been fascinated with cemeteries -- and, even as a child, didn't find them to be scary places.  Somber, perhaps, but peaceful, tranquil, quiet.  Part of it was simple familiarity; I lived with my grandmother for about a year and a half when I was a kid, in the little village of Broussard, Louisiana, and her house was only half a block away from Sacred Heart Catholic Church, with its attendant (and very old) cemetery.  So in my free time I spent many hours wandering amongst the gravestones, reading the inscriptions and wondering who those people had been, what their lives and deaths had been like.

So okay, maybe I was kind of a peculiar child.  I doubt anyone who knows me would find that particularly surprising.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Bobbywomble, Old Grave Stone, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Some years later, I visited the cemetery in southwestern Pennsylvania where my great-grandparents were buried (as well as many cousins of varying degrees, and older generations of the family -- the Scottish/English side of my family lived in that part of the world for two centuries).  While most of the inscriptions in the (largely French-speaking) community of Broussard were pretty prosaic -- names, dates of birth and death, and every once in a while something like "Chère Maman" or "Toujours Dans Nos Coeurs" -- the ones in the mostly Anglo-Celtic, Protestant community where the Pennsylvania branch of my family resided frequently waxed poetic.  I still remember one that had the haunting, eerie lines,

Remember, friend, as you pass by,
As you are now, so once was I;
As I am now, so you will be;
Prepare for death, and follow me.

Grim, but also strangely beautiful. 

Of course, not all of them were so thought-provoking.  There was also one that said,

Here lies my wife, Sarah Bly.
She's at peace, and so am I.

They all contain stories, from the poignant to the banal.  Some of the tales they tell, though, are hidden, and the graves can hold secrets you'd never guess.  I'd long wondered why my great-great grandfather, Elias Scott, was buried there when he died in August of 1884, while his wife, Harriet (Kent) Scott, who'd died only two months earlier, was not.  It was only after going through transcripts of old newspaper clippings that I found out the reason.  Elias had suffered from "shaking palsy" (now called Parkinson's disease) and had been in a slow decline for years.  That whole side of the family was too poor to afford good nursing help, and Harriet had been solely responsible for his day-to-day care.  According to the article I found in the Waynesburg Republican, Harriet had succumbed to despair from her burdens and had taken her own life by poison, explaining why she wasn't buried with her husband -- many sects of Christianity forbid the burial of suicides on consecrated ground, which adds an extra layer of tragedy to the whole story.  The article did say, though, that she had been "an excellent lady when in her right mind, and had the respect of all who knew her."  I was so shaken by this discovery that it inspired me to write a poem -- infrequent for me, as poetry is not my usual medium -- which I titled Nocturne for Mrs. Scott:

Her husband watches from the bed they share,
Watery eyes following her deft movements,
The cleaning and tidying, done with no conscious thought.
Take his empty water glass, put away the medicine the doctor left.
Straighten the lace on the bedside table, pull back the curtains.
She will not meet his eyes.
Her mind is caught in a web of remembering,
Trapped like a dying moth waiting for the sting, the poison, and oblivion.

She sees a time when this weak and withered man
Whose thin limbs and creaking voice she despises,
Was a laughing farm boy with chestnut hair and powerful arms,
And she remembers the chase, and wanting to be caught,
His arm looping around her waist,
Catching her up, twirling, spinning, kissing,
And falling to the ground together.

She despises him more because it wasn't always as it is now,
The dying old man fading and failing on the linen sheets,
Leaving her still in the midst of her strength,
Still in the depth of her own needs.

There is a brown glass bottle in the cabinet, near his medicine.
The paper label is gashed with crimson lettering.
Each time she pours the medicine, thick and dark, into a cup for him to drink from,
Her eyes brush across the label with a touch like snow on bare skin,
And she wonders how long it would take, and how she would feel, free.
Then she sees the laughing boy he once was,
And she leans against the counter
And weeps for her own weakness and wickedness and foolishness.

One summer morning, after the cleaning and tidying and straightening and pulling back of curtains,
The brown glass bottle with the crimson lettering
Fell from her numb fingers to shatter on the tile floor of the kitchen,
A trickle of dark fluid staining the jagged fragments.
And upstairs, the creaking voice, weak from need, weak from not wanting to need,
Still calls for her.

Humans have been ritually burying the dead for at least a hundred thousand years -- the first certain burial is from Qafzeh, Israel, and carbon-dates to around then -- and possibly a lot longer ago than that.  When the concept of an afterlife became woven into it is a matter of pure conjecture, but certainly ancient "grave goods" -- things like tools and adornments and talismans -- suggest that our ancestors very early on were convinced that there was some kind of life after death, and providing the deceased with cool or useful stuff would ensure that they at least started off well.

I still recall being in college, and reading the lilting, sassy poem To His Coy Mistress, by the seventeenth-century writer Andrew Marvell, which has to be the ultimate carpe diem poem ever written.  (An English lit major friend summarized it, accurately if crudely, as "Life's short, let's fuck.")  Marvell's lines, "The grave's a fine and private place/ But none, I think, do there embrace," are certainly in that spirit, but I think the poem says way more than simply a plea for love.  A walk through a graveyard is a good exercise in staying cognizant of life's fragility -- and its shortness.  Marvell's poem reminds us of that as well, and I've found the final stanza to be good advice, even beyond the amorous aspects.  And perhaps that's as good a place as any to end this:

Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Through the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our Sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

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