Graveyards

Graveyards

I hope the title doesn’t sound too dismal. One of things that my father taught me to appreciate was a graveyard. Even as a small child I remember him taking me to the family plot in La Crosse, Wisconsin. Nested in a wooded area close to the Mississippi River bluffs, he showed me the final resting place of my ancestors.

Now, we call these places cemeteries and many people don’t like to go there unless forced to by the circumstances of death: their own, a friend or a loved one. My dad told me there is a lot of history to be found there. He would take me around the place and read the quotations on headstones and even laugh at some of them.

Since I’m in the business of burying people and grieving with ones left behind, I do not share the fear of walking among the dead. As I travel around Montana, I find all kinds of graveyards. Some are beautiful with trees and green grass. Others are long forgotten and unkempt. You find them along the back roads and next to freeways. Some are encircled by the sprawl of growing cities and others hidden in quiet hollows.

I remember the burial of a friend on Boot Hill in Virginia City, Montana. He was buried in a pine box that was lowered into the ground by ropes. The pallbearers were cowboys standing tall in their rain slickers. The sky was grey and cold that March morning. After we shoveled dirt into the grave, I walked around and read the tombstones of some of the toughest hombres in the West. My friend was laid to rest in the midst of a lot of Montana history.

Thomas Grey, a 20^th century English poet wrote an “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” One stanza comes to mind as I come to the end of this musing: “Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree’s shade, Where heaves the turf in many a moldering heap, Each in his narrow cell forever laid, the rude forefathers on the hamlet sleep.”                      

The Bible reminds us: “But as for me, I know my Redeemer lives, and he will stand upon the earth at last. And after my body has decayed, yet in my body I will see God.”