Ecotone: Writing About Place: CemeteriesAndPlace

Discussion about Cemeteries can be found at DiscussCemeteriesAndPlace.

[WriteOutLoud] I've always loved them because they're all about stories. In any cemetery, you've got stories all around you: names, and dates of birth and death. You can think about their lives; you can "remember" something you don't really know.

[Feathers of Hope (Numenius)] Sometimes ancestors' gravestones are found online.

[Fragments from Floyd] To ponder the incomprehensibility that I am here at all, alive, conscious and corporeal, I go to a cemetery. There, under the polished rocks and plastic flowers and cold sod lie those who have passed to the other side of this greatest of mysteries and know what I cannot know standing there with my hat in my hand. But I will someday know. Cemeteries are the green and flowered surface dedicated to the memory of the dead who disintegrate below, a faint tribute to their lives and gesture of hope for their eternal spirits, elsewhere. No other place on earth can bring me closer to the reality of my own finitude than a cemetery. All cemeteries regardless of their aesthetics or geography bring me to the day of my own death. But not all have had the impact on me as that one beautiful and horrible cemetery from years ago. It was just the other side of my garden fence.

[Monumental_moments] I can't think of a better topic for the first week of a new year. A cemetery is a reminder that there's a full stop on all of our sentences -- but looking through the inscriptions or just absorbing the environment, you can also feel that it's not really the end that matters as much as the infinite variety of clauses and phrases you've already written, and the equally rich text that is yet to come. -- P.

[Feathers of Hope (Pica)] My own passion for cemeteries originated in a passion for birds, which are often found in profusion in cemeteries, where there are often trees and water, just the thing for a 2-ounce warbler exhausted by the northward migration.

[alembic]The last time I set foot in the cemetery of my childhood town was with my father sometime in the late 1960s. I was already living in Budapest with my mother then, though I was still ignorant of our family history and the true chemistry in the fresh brass on the few crosses we possessed in our household, including that on my grandparents¡¯ grave. On this occasion, when I went to the cemetery with my father, there was something new on the headstone of our family grave. Engraved in gold and under the names of his parents, there it was, his own name with the date of his birth, a dash, and the first two digits, ¡°19¡± with the last two left to be chiseled in after his death, which he knew was near.

[olderandgrowing] ...At the foot of the hill, at the seaward edge of a relatively level patch of green between the rough slopes of the hill and the low cliffs bordering the sea, is a small graveyard. Just a stone perimeter, the ruins of a small stone chapel and maybe two dozen headstones...

[Mulubinba Moments] ...Sandgate Cemetery is a place I'd rather avoid. An entire suburb of graves. Hot in summer, cold in winter. Barren and lifeless all year round. I'd rather you scatter my ashes in a place that lifts the spirit...

[under the firestar] Park Street Cemetery was inaugurated in 1767, the oldest cemetery in Calcutta. ... Mausolea shaped like houses were crowded together amid tall crotons and palms. It was like coming upon ancient ruins in a jungle...