#Difference between graveyard and cemetery full
I’ll walk you through everything, literally.” I’d start with the outline of what they needed to consider: Do you already have family here you want to be near? Do you want an upright monument or a flat headstone? How many family members are you hoping to be buried alongside? Have you thought about if you will be cremated or have a traditional full burial? Always the same questions, always the same order. “It would be terrible if you’d had enough practice to become good at it. “I’m so relieved to hear that,” I’d say, and mean it. I don’t know where to start.” This was the easiest beginning, and one I always hoped for.Īrtwork by Pam Holnback.
#Difference between graveyard and cemetery how to
Many would begin with an apology: “I’m sorry, I don’t know how to buy a grave. Other matters we managed individually, and for me, this meant appointments to purchase graves. Often I’d learn of his presence on the grounds only by his air compressor’s distant drone, and before I had a chance to say hello I’d hear his pickup rattling out of our cemetery and on to the next. He darted in and out of cemeteries all over the state, adding death dates to headstones of recent burials where either tall heaps of dirt waited to be settled by rains, or wreaths over discreet openings marked cremations. Several matters required collaboration from a number of professionals: funeral directors, gravediggers, monument-company employees, and the elusive engraver. There were leather-bound folios written with fountain pen in elegant cursive, and small notebooks logging the penciled scrawlings of barely literate, grave-digging drunkards, up through our current spreadsheets. I was simply given a standard receipt book you can purchase at any office supply store, and an array of maps and records of the cemetery’s 125 years. No one prepared me for moments like this, or anything else, when I became sexton of our Catholic cemetery. Her father smiled at us from the passenger window as he watched me help his daughter stand up and brush off the blades of his grave’s grass that clung to her hair and blouse. She lay down alongside her teenage son, who had quietly wandered through neighboring headstones until called upon to proxy for his grandmother, and I took pictures as they asked. Facing east to rise and greet the Last Day.” I extended my left foot and tapped the middle of her mother’s grave then, pacing south through the increment of measure in my legs’ muscle memory, I tapped the center of his grave. “Bride on the left and groom on the right, just like at their wedding. “Where,” she asked me, “where exactly are my parents going to be?” “Seriously? Okay.” She ended the call with her father, pulled up her camera app, and handed me her phone. Her husband nodded again from the car, this time towards their daughter. Katherine Tucker, Old Times There Are Not Forgotten, oil on panel, 2015 Artwork by Katherine Tucker. I couldn’t help being drawn into their dynamic. Why not?” This family was playful, taking the task at hand seriously, but not resisting the joy we all found in such a beautiful afternoon. “‘Try before you buy’ is a great policy, though I don’t get many takers on it here,” I pretended to muse. We were almost finished, when they had one more question. It was too perfect a spring day to lose minutes doing the paperwork in an office. The sparse grass growing in filtered sun where we stood was a fair trade for goldfinches and orioles nesting nearby, and bluebirds enticed to take up residence in little boxes on the ravine’s perimeter. Gathered around their daughter’s cell phone, we documented their arrangements, under the shade of the thick timber that creeps yearly closer to our platted graves. The labor exerted in his simple nod was a sobering contrast to the vivacity of his wife, also in her seventies.
He nodded to his wife in confirmation, participating via cell phone from their son’s car on the cemetery’s driveway, where he sat, too weak to get out. It was a flourish more fitting for a game show than two graves. “These two? These are the ones we want!” The woman, with a twirl of her wrists and a sweeping motion of her slender arms, approximated through her gesture the area she and her husband had settled on.
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