Graveyards as wandering places

Graveyards are at the same time comforting and so full of ritual and personal meaning that they are erie to me.

I started going to see the grave of my father's dad, Blackie, when I was very young. He had died in the 1970's and so our visits to his grave was one of the ways I could have a physical marker of his life and death. We would go to his grave in the early fall. My Yia Yia used to say that Blackie died "when everything else was dying," so she could never forget when the date of his death was approaching. Going to the graveyard usually meant walking straight to Blackie's grave, feeling some vauge sense of connection and loss and then wandering around the rest of the Greek section of the graveyard looking at names and dates and being surprised at the ages people had passed on.

As my sister and I got older we romanticised the graveyard in Cheyenne, WY (our home town) and I had elementary and middle school friends that would tell stories of going into the graveyard and having regular communications with specific people buried there. I was scared by their stories. I never really wanted the ghosts to talk back to me when we wandered around the head stones. But, I started to greet them and let them know about my day or how I felt being there. I still practice this and initially it has always been a bit awkward, but as I keep talking I don't doubt the feeling that I am being heard.

When Liz and I walked up and down the rows of markers and statues in the New Woodstock graveyard, I thought about how many times I have found a place to sit, talk, walk or explore inside the gates of graveyards in my home towns or towns that I only know from the roadway. I thought about how many times I have read the etchings on a stone and found out they were born on my birthday or died the random day I found myself in that graveyard. Reading those dates and feeling an instant connection with the person marked by them is an involuntary response for me. It allows me to feel full of purpose and respect as I wander above strangers buried in a ground that is regularly broken and remade in ritual.

So few "wandering places" in my life allow me to reflect on who has been there, what has been there, and what memories will stay a part of the place. I wander streets and find my grounding in symbols and cultural artifacts. I wander buildings and am always apprehensive. I wander around parks and squares, using the constructed focal points or meeting places for my grounding. I wander markets, filling my eyes and stomach with my grounding there. But as I walk through graves it is the markers of people, time, place, birth and death. So I had questions: should that information be explicit in more spaces, would people change the way they behave if that was more a part of daily life and the places we navigate? Should that information be more than just a plaque or statue when it exists as a memorial? Is it the enormity of so many plaques and statues in a graveyard that evokes such a sense of individual history? How do we do that, should we do that in other places? --by courtney