Dodgeville

This red-tailed hawk seemed to be concentrating on something as I walked past this afternoon. A companion? Some potential prey? Another top predator, perhaps?

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The great thing about what is euphemistically called pre-need funeral planning is that you not only get to pick what goes on your headstone, but you get to admire it yourself. I can only assume that’s the explanation behind this seemingly pre-need headstone in Ashburn’s Burns Cemetery. The inscribed poem is so familiar that the second rhyming couplet almost slips past without notice:

Do not stand at my grave and weep,
I am not there, I do not sleep.
I am the loud pipes of a Harley, Chevy or Ford,
Or an Elvis song played in three chords.

I like it.

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This marker is in Bethel Cemetery in Pickering.

If you walk through any cemetery that’s been in operation for more than a hundred years, you’ll soon notice two things. The first is the sheer number of children that used to die before they were old enough to crawl and how many families had two, three, or more children that didn’t live to their tenth birthdays.

The second is an unusual obsession with precision exhibited on many markers. I can understand marking a dead child’s age as three weeks or 22 days, but many of the markers for older people also include precise counts of months and days. It always seems a little odd to see a grandmother’s age tallied up in the same manner as a toddler’s.

A lot of people shy away from cemeteries, but I always find them fascinating. Taking a stroll through an old cemetery is like walking through a highly-condensed social history of a region. As you progress from older graves to newer ones, the names change, occupations shift, family relationships become clear, and tributes to achievements both major and minor abound.

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