Unmarked

We take death very seriously. We are fascinated and afraid. Law makers spend at least half of their time conjuring up rules in hopes of preventing death. Our lifespans have doubled in quantity, often dwindling in quality, while billions of dollars are invested in research all in a vain attempt to try and cheat death. And, when we inevitably fail to outrun, outwit and outlast death, billions more are spent on the rituals and finery of final dispositions. Of course there's really nothing final about death. Your existence is indelibly marked on this planet whether you are here for five minutes or fifty years. We're all still breathing the same are as Cleopatra. Right now you may be swallowing Genghis Khan molecules from your coffee. Still, humans- whether athiest, agnostic or fundamentalist- insist on marking passings from this life.

Friday night we went on a local cemetery tour. There are more dead occupants in this tourist town than living which, as far as I can tell, makes the cemetery an anthropological hotspot. There were stories of two people dead of fright on the same night at different wharfs, of ghost children-victims of cholera-spotted playing on the hilltop and Oliver Towne the mysterious bank robber who accidentally tripped his dynamite belt on his way to his get away car rendering him, all over town. There's the million dollar monument to the now extinct Hose family, chaste inheritors of a family fortune finally left to a charity on account of their Grandfather's will which deprived them of their inheritance should they ever marry or propagate. There's the tallest monument of Mary O'Connell installed by a loving husband who declared, "May it make her fit for heaven for she was certainly not fit as a wife" and a town founder, a business magnate with investments in every pie, who bought sixteen plots for his wife and fourteen children but never found the time to marry.

All of these characters and more, laid side by each for all eternity on a plot of land at the edge of the city; their legends and stories, mythologized for over a century and engraved in stone. We are not, incidentally, the only animals who orchestrate funerals. Crows do to. But, as far as I know, we are the only animals who take our lives, and deaths, seriously enough to plot and mark our graves. And, while I'm glad cemeteries exist for bit of fun on a Friday night, I can't help but wonder if, perhaps, they don't miss the point.

Back in June I was driving past the town that's home to my grandfather's grave and the thought crossed my mind to stop and pay my respects. I last went to his grave a few years before when my Grandmother moved away from that town and I thought I'd probably never be there again. It was winter then and in a culturally irreverent act I'm certain would have made Grandpa laugh and shake his head, I left him a snow angel. But now it was summer and even as the thought crossed my mind a visit to his grave just didn't seem right so I just kept driving. Ten minutes later I saw the convenience store my Grandpa, a big man with only one thumb and a notorious temper but a boisterous laugh and twinkly eyes, used to take me to for ice cream. This time I pulled off the highway.

I bought strawberry ice cream and sat reminiscing about my stays at my Grandparent's old farm only a few miles away. Almost every afternoon was spent at the Chicken Chef in town where he met his friends to see who could spin off the wildest or funniest stories. Twice a week we would go to town to sell eggs and afterward Grandpa would take me to Tourond for ice cream. Back then it was soft ice cream, a twist cone, sometimes dipped but usually straight up. But even if today it was strawberry, hard and swirled I still felt closer to him sitting on that picnic table, ice cream melting in sticky pink pools at the bottom of a waxy cup, than I ever would have in a field full of bones and stones.

And isn't that the point? You can lay a body down North to South, you can lay a body in the ground East to West, you can mark the spot with sticks or stones, you can lay a wreath or plant a tree. Whatever way you choose to try and thwart it, mortality- yours and mine- is certain, impermanent and impossible to set in stone.