My love affair with graveyards began when I was a kid. My first time in one was when I was attending a funeral and I've been enthralled by them ever since. I mean, c'mon! Who DOESN'T love a creepy cemetery, after dark....shadows of headstones cast haphazardly in the moonlight? Who doesn't wonder about the person laying there for eternity? What kind of life did they live? For me a cemetery is a link back through history and is the last tangible evidence that someone existed. You see proof of diseases that whiped out entire families and testaments of gunfights gone wrong.
My favorite graveyard is in New Hampshire. My husband and I went back there to trace my family history and find a particular burial plot. The cemetery looked like it could have been used in a Halloween movie. Headstones tipped precariously over after settling into the earth for almost 300 years. Gnarled old trees stood with age-old wisdom and creep-factor galore. If you closed your eyes you could almost hear the whispers of bygone spirits in the wind. We found my family plot and all I could do was sit there and wonder about my ancestors laying there (after I made pencil tracings on paper of their names of course!). It love the link that graveyards give me to our personal past, our country's history, and the knowledge that those buried there were human beings not much different than myself. Ok...so they dressed a lOT differently and didn't have to deal with as much traffic and road rage as I do, but they were people. They just had to worry about smallpox, crappy transportation...small stuff like that.
And why the deceased chose to hang out there is beyond me, but there is no bigger rush in the world than connecting with them through EVP sessions and K2 hits. I would much rather hang out with the dead than deal with some of the living. And I hope some day my great-great-great grandchildren will be making headstone tracings of MY name and wonder how it was back in the "olden days".
No comments:
Post a Comment