Why I Walk Through Graveyards
Why do I walk through graveyards?
I get out of my car and enter a city of the dead. Their homes are scattered everywhere, like building blocks in a child’s playroom. Blocks of stone and marble, of weathered faces eroded by the elements and the passage of time.
The South has some of the best graveyards because they have trees dripping with Spanish moss. It hangs long and tangled, drifting on the breeze with the decadence of witch’s hair. The trees linger over graves, guarding them against the sun, against the bitter wind. Let the dead rest in peace, they declare. Let them sleep soundly under our shade.
I listen to the whispers of the dearly departed. I listen to their evanescent voices as they tell me their stories. The whispers are as fickle as a snowflake kissing my palm; here one second, gone the next. But still, I catch glimpses. Still, I catch small peeks into the lives of people long gone.
The infant graves are the saddest, yet the most intriguing. Small little headstones, some decorated with precious lambs. For some, the day of their birth and the day of their death are one and the same. Others live a couple of years. I can’t imagine the pain a pair of parents experienced laying their little one to rest, even if it was over a century ago, but every time I pass one, I feel a special reverence for those graves.
I read the faded faces, trying to decipher the dates. You can infer a lot from the dates. A man died in his twenties. A mother and daughter died on the same day; the daughter’s birthday. A wife had to spend 54 years widowed and separated from her husband before she went to join him.
The dead whisper their stories.
Then my imagination takes over as I take in my macabre setting. I see ghosts shifting among the headstones. I can picture what the graves look like in the silver glow of a full moon. I stare at the statue of a young woman, a finger to her lips, gazing pensively at the sky. At any moment, it looks as if she may come to life and come down from her pedestal to do something nefarious.
So back to the original question: why do I walk through graveyards?
Maybe it’s because I’m strange, and I’ve always been strange, and I don’t see any reason to change now. Maybe because graveyards cast an enchantment of beauty over me that I seldom find elsewhere. They are cradles of inspiration, fantasy, and loveliness. They inspire me to write. They inspire me to be quiet and just be. They remind me that I won’t always be here; so that being the case, I better make sure my life counts for something.
That is why I walk through graveyards.
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