Melancholy

"A river to the south to wash away our sins
A college to the east of us, to learn where sin begins
and a graveyard to the west of it all which I may soon be lying in..."
-Oregon Hill, Cowboy Junkies




My parents live one street over from what, when I was growing up, we jokingly referred to as the "Highway to Heaven." Following the road from west to east there is a medical clinic, no less than three churches, a "college" and finally a cemetery.

This afternoon, during a lull in this week long rain, I attempted to shake my malaise, and possibly stir up some inspiration from the nuanced stories in the headstones, with a visit to the cemetery. There are two other, more atmospheric, cemeteries in town but the prairie winds were piercing cold and I didn't know when the rain would start again so I decided to stay close to home.

I love visiting cemeteries, particularly when I travel. They are a true history of any place you might find yourself. Like the rings in the trunk of a tree, graveyards provide a record, both obvious and subtle, of life and loss to be deciphered. Plagues, population and demographic shifts and immigration influxes, all these things can be measured by the clues on the headstones.

More than just history there's also the culture, philosophies and poetry of life cut to the quick in pithy epitaphs:
"Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak whispers
the o'erfraught heart and bids it break... "- Shakespeare
 or
``If I should die think only this of me:
That there`s some corner of a foreign field that is England.`` - Rupert Brook


In Halifax we found cemeteries with the remains of Titanic passengers, in Prague the Jewish cemetery dates back to 1300. I once did a road trip to Neepawa, Manitoba to try and find the marker that inspired Margaret  Laurence to write the "Stone Angel". (I never found the exact grave, but it was autumn and the Pembina Valley was such a vibrant red and gold that trip still rivals Salem, Mass.-which, by the way has some fascinating cemeteries of it's own- as my favourite place to have experienced fall.)

And beneath these layers of geographic histories are the personal sagas hinted at by the styles of stones, the words etched eternally in stone and the souls that surround them. In some graveyards I've seen whole families dead within months of each other, couples who pass within days of each other and the sad mysterious anonymous or unknowns.

But, while the mature couples who cannot seem to live apart make me whimsically sigh, there is always one section in every cemetery that breaks my heart. I had thought, maybe hoped, that because the one I was in this afternoon was modern and new, maybe this section wouldn't exist, or at least it would be smaller thanks to all our advances and modern medicine. But there just the same, in the southwest corner, was the baby cemetery with all the uniquely familiar tombstones marked " Our Dearest" or "Sweetest" or "Most Cherished Littlest Angel.``

Thinking of the story, attributed to Hemmingway:  ``For Sale: Baby shoes. Never Worn.`` I turned to head for home with that piercing prairie wind making my eyes sting.

Plautdietsch phrase of the day: Dot stiemt und stiemt und stiemt noch immer = It storms and storms and storms forever.