In Memory

I open my eyes and truly… truly open my eyes. Feet sink softly into raked sand, the crabgrass that tries to grow here isn’t doing too good of a job, just what you would expect so close to the shore of coastal Georgia.
But I was talking about eyes, wasn’t I?
I open them and gaze into the scenery before me. A cemetery. Oh, yes, I know… silly goth-type of writing, some sort of monologue where this angst-y kid is trying to seem dramatic, setting her scene in a cemetery.
Let me tell you something. I’ve never really been classed in any category. I can blend in with all of the seeming outcast circles. I’m not here trying to say something about how dreary and drab the world is, woe is me woe is me.
No. I’m here because I’m glad I’m alive. It’s a beautiful, if not a touch cool late January afternoon in lovely St. Mary’s, Georgia. I’m standing in the St. Mary’s cemetery. I’m here because this place calls to me, because it’s a piece of history that is linked to me through one tenebrous strand. How fragile, a memory of late childhood. Crystallized and focused into a pure image. I’m here because this place radiates peace like no other does. So old, St. Mary’s is the second oldest city in the U.S., so old and yet brushing up against the shore with other relics from this little town’s past, mingling janglingly with the sight of shiny new cars, phone booths, and pretty sparkly white Christmas lights. There are churches here that have stood for 200 years, with little more than some new wiring and pipes and maybe a fresh coat of paint to bring them into this new era.
Sometimes, on a good, quiet day, when there are almost no cars, you can imagine what this city was like a hundred years ago or more. Here, so close to the water, you can forget where we are, but I digress. It’s not the waterfront park I’m here to tell you about. It’s the lost memories.
I climb the steps over the low wall surrounding the cemetery and truly look around. I see a lot of modern headstones of polished granite and fancy machine-cut ivy and sometimes prettily painted headstones. I see quite a few of these, with modern dates etched deeply into the stone. This isn’t what I’m here for. I can tell by the fresh flowers that these people have relatives who still come and sit and think.
I wander deeper into this place of eternal rest, where squirrels make their homes, and houses line just the other side of the street. Deeper under the sparse coverage of old and often dying or dead oaks, palmettos, and other local flora; deeper to look at the early blooming flowered trees and bushes planted by caring groundskeepers.
Here is what I am seeking, the worn tombs. The eroded markings, the civil war soldiers cut down, graves marked only by crumbling and pitiful markers, some with tattered rebel flags to say that someone cares… but some show nothing. I move deeper.
Finally I come to something. Once it was surrounded by a beautiful wrought-iron gate. It’s long since rusted and its gate tilts drunkenly inside, rusted open. The groundskeeper keeps the sand raked, but other than that, he has far too many charges to tend to for him to pay closer attention to this monument. My eyes seek out a date, and find one from so long ago that it’s impossible that anyone could still remember this person. It’s obvious that her husband loved her by the huge tomb he erected, paid to have the tale of her death engraved into the side. I move on, wandering through this place of eternal rest, reading, remembering. Here a whole family, infant grandchildren, their parents, a grandfather, several other generations… an empty place for a grandmother who was never buried there. Rows and rows of markers with no names; tiny headstones, alone in the shadow of a tree. Here I see a tomb tiny enough for a child, cracked heavily and barely standing, the brick long since crumbling, the granite cover deeply etched, and shattered. Nothing about this lost child is legible in the stone, and from the sorry state of the monument, nobody really cares, except the groundskeeper who has tried to reassemble it as best he can with limited tools. Well, him and I. There are so very many children’s graves here, most beside parents, in family plots marked by low stone walls, or granite beams set down to delineate the family’s boundaries. Sometimes the headstones are in lovely brick constructs, with arching gateways and walls I can hardly see over. Some are very sad, leaning or broken and utterly alone in the middle of a gaping area.
I stop beside another tomb, of beautiful white marble. A young woman, no older than early twenties, her marker is a single piece of snow-white marble, headstone, footstone, and tablet over the burial mound, with a vase built into the tablet to hold perhaps her favorite flowers. The headstone itself is an incredible piece of craftsmanship, looking very much like a cathedra window carved delicately of marble. The vase is empty, though. There are no new tombs within this small dividing wall. Someone loved her very much to bury her this way, and yet nobody was buried beside her.
The ones that were loved always bring a tear, but it’s the one that cannot be remembered for their eroded monuments that cause me to reflect deeply.
Why am I here, chalk and rubbing paper in hand? Trying to capture a piece of this history, but I shouldn’t be here with these supplies. These don’t quite capture the air here. The feel. I must come back later with a camera and take pictures, before the acid rain that still has not faded, even after the closing of the paper mill, eats away at these precious works of art, devoted in memory of people once loved, once people.
What feeling does this place give me?
Something akin to peace, I suppose. Peace mingled with sadness, a deep sadness, in fact. Yet, there’s something akin to hope here, too. There’s fear, as well, contemplating the final rest in the cold, sandy ground. Something more, though. If that’s the end of it, to come to this place and rest, then perhaps it isn’t so bad. Maybe this is why we put so much sacredness into the resting places of the dead. It isn’t for them, no, not really. It’s for us, because we cannot imagine that eternal sleeplike state being anything that’s not at least somehow happy, even if it is just for the place the body rests.
I look and I look, though, and do not see who I came to sit with. Before long, I hear my name called by my fellow revelers,  and I turn away, to seek that crystallized memory some other time. It’s not like she’s going anywhere. I almost laugh, and then sadly, I do.
As the man said…. "Life does not cease to be funny when people die any more than it ceases to be serious when people laugh."
So why not laugh...
In memory.