While I'm Alive

Growing up, the idea of death wasn’t a foreign or negative one. When you’re raised in a Christian household, you’re taught to view death as a good thing and see it as finally leaving the toils of Earth and moving onto paradise. My parents never shielded me from death and I attended my fair share of funerals as a small child before I could even begin to grasp their meaning. We’d take trips to grave yards to search for past family member’s headstones, taking time to point out the oldest graves we could find. It was fascinating to me to think how these were all once people just like me, all with their own stories and lives and families. The idea of so many bodies in one place never scared me, it sort of comforted me in a way.

My affection towards cemeteries didn’t blossom until recent years when I finally got my drivers license. I spent my childhood in rural Pennsylvania surrounded by woods and farms but I was never really allowed to do a whole lot of exploring outside my property. So the second I had my sliver of freedom, I started going on drives. I didn’t really have too many close friends growing up, so I got used to just going and doing things on my own. I’d go antiquing, sit for hours in coffee shops, and of course my favorite activity, sit in cemeteries.

I’d often find a spot to read or draw, or I’d wander around reading epitaphs and inventing stories about who these people might have been. It’s most captivating for me to find a whole family’s plot. A whole generation, mother, father, and children all together forever in one place. Did they want to be kept like this? Did they get along? Does anyone ever come to visit them? I think about that a lot, especially with the graves that have been so worn and weathered it’s almost impossible to decipher the dates. I wonder if they still have living families around or if they’ve been forgotten completely. Am I the first person in decades to think of their name? I like to think that me dwelling there isn’t a disrespect, rather, I’m keeping these century old skeletons company.

There’s a small cemetery deep in the woods behind my house almost completely overgrown with raspberry bushes and saplings. If you weren’t intentionally looking, it’d be fairly easy to overlook as just a dumping site. The ornate iron fence is rusted beyond repair and sunken in the ground, the etching in the headstones is washed away and pieces of broken concrete litter the ground. It’s only a dozen or so graves, but it’s probably one of my favorite graveyards, mostly because of how weirdly nostalgic it makes me feel. It probably belongs to the families that used to live in my neighborhood, maybe even were the ones to build my house two hundred years ago. I imagine they must have buried each other, a generation gone through and eventually moved out of the country leaving their family graves behind. And now it sits completely forgotten, the vegetation taking over more and more each day. How long until more cemeteries begin to look like that? How long until we’re all completely forgotten except by the occasional teenager to stumble upon us and sit near us for a while? The idea doesn’t frighten me, rather it makes me feel connected to these strangers in the ground, knowing that one day I might be resting beside them much like I do while I’m alive.