Today I took advantage of the nice weather to do something I haven't done in almost ten years. I went to Oak Ridge Cemetery to visit my friend, Michael, who passed away in 1998 after being struck by a car.
As I stood by his gravestone I noticed how well kept it appeared in comparison to the others nearby. I know Mike has several siblings and both his parents are still alive to maintain his resting place. I guess whoever survived these others have either passed themselves, or moved away or just moved on.
This was when I noticed the other graves seemed to be closer together than I remembered. Does Oak Ridge exhume its residents and move them into ossuaries or catacombs? Do all cemeteries do this? Did this mean I was actually standing over empty ground, and not my friend's remains? If so, than it's more important than I realized to maintain your loved one's headstones. I'd always thought of them as a kind of place marker, and taking care of them a form of therapy for the grieving, but when you understand they can be the last tangible link to a loved one they invoke much more pain and significance. A life reduced to remembrance in the form of an engraved stone, and as I saw with some of Mike's neglected neighbors the world moves on and eventually forgets.
Gorgeous day today.
And now, because I like to keep things light, please enjoy this:
2 comments:
there's no ossuaries or catacombs at oak ridge. go back into the older sections north of lincoln's tomb; there's graves from the mid 19th century. if they were going the ossuary route there's no way they'd leave all those there.
In theory 10% or 15% of the purchase of a grave site (along with the tombstone) is put aside by the cemetary for future upkeep.
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