May 26, 2016: At the Cemetery

I lived quite close to my parish cemetery as a child, and spent hours wandering around the gravestones. My siblings and I were quite fascinated by the gravestones and the aura that could be found within.  There were three cemeteries at my church.  The oldest one held mostly Irish graves, from the time St Patrick Church was in the long-gone village of Athlone.  The second cemetery held mostly German, but some Irish graves.  The names in this cemetery populate the village of Carleton and fill the pews of St Pat’s to this day.  This is were my people lay.  The third cemetery was mostly empty when I was a child but lay adjacent to a wooded area owned by the parish.  There one could find perfectly good plastic flowers, the kind that were popular in the 60’s, that we would scrounge through and take home to Mom.  She did not appreciate our offerings.

Our wanderings in the cemeteries did not cease.  We would find the right place by going to the large cross in the middle of the cemetery.  Our family was all around it. We would visit the graves of our baby brothers, one older than me, one younger, but always babies.  They were near our paternal grandfather, Grandpa Gus, and many members of his extended family, including Grandpa and Grandma’s baby girl Helen.  Then there were Grandpa’s parents, and their two infants, Peter and Helen.  When I was 16 Grandma Lena was laid to rest next to her husband, but before her death she bought new headstones for Grandpa, with a place for her name, her baby daughter Helen, and her grandsons Michael and John.  I visited less frequently then.  After my mother was buried by the babies when I was 19 I all but stopped going there.

The landscape of the cemetery changed when my Dad realized there was no spot next to Mom for him.  He did the unthinkable, to Mom’s family, and had her removed and reburied at Michigan Memorial Park where he could be buried next to her.  He planned to move the babies and did move Johnny.  Michael’s remains could not be found where they should have been.  (St Patrick Cemetery #2 had dubious records.)  So, he left the headstone Grandma had bought in the place Michael should have been.  I would have liked to have had the boys still together. 

In later years I began genealogical research and revisited the graves in St Patrick’s.  There were other family members to be found, Grandpa’s parents, his grandparents, great aunts and uncles, cousins, and many more.  Some stones were nearly illegible, but we (my sister and I) took photographs of all that we found.  We also visited the early cemetery of St Charles Church, two cemeteries there, and photographed the tombstones.  This is where Grandma’s parents, and extended family were buried.  Her parents and grandparents were in the old cemetery, her brothers in the new one.  As a kid I remember going there for family funerals, but we never played there.  But we didn’t live next door to it either.

My children grew used to stops at cemeteries while we vacationed. I would spot an ancient one, and we would park and visit, and most often photograph the most unusual or interesting graves.  When I moved to a different city for work, I lived near an old and stately cemetery that I would walk the dog in. We found many unique resting places there also.  In Virginia I was moved by the stones in one cemetery that simply stated, “two union soldiers”, or “three confederate soldiers.” Those poor families that never knew the end stories of their young men.  In Mississippi I was startled by the grave of a Confederate Officer that had lived to an old age, that flew both the flag of the Union and the flag of the Confederacy. 

In 2016 my sister and I went to Quebec.  The major objective of our journey into our past was to find the churches and graves of our people.   At the churches, we found the graves had been lost to the ravages of time.  There were records.  One cemetery had been washed away by flooding, one was decimated by a tornado, and one had been moved from the city to an outlying area for health and safety reasons.  There were markers, but not individual graves.  We were saddened by this.  We had hoped to find our direct ancestors graves, but did find many, many of our family names, so we knew we were walking in their final resting places.  We did realize we were looking for graves that were over 300 years old, that many probably had wooden markers, or no markers at all.  Some of our grandparents were probably buried at family plots, and the farms long lost to population growth and expansion. 

There is just something peaceful about a cemetery.  To walk among the dead, and commune with their spirits. I like to think we are honoring their lives and keeping their memories alive.  That is what I would like after my death.  To be remembered. I think that is what we all want. Validation that we lived, we loved, and maybe contributed to this world. 

I was introduced to the poetry of John McCrae as a teenager and will never forget his words: “Short days ago we lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow. Loved and were loved.”   (Flanders Fields) Maybe that is all I want people to remember:  I loved and was loved.