Cemeteries . . .

. . . are fascinating places for a history lover like me to spend hours of quiet meditation. Yes, they are sad places too, but the cycle of life and death is part of our existence as humans, and not something that we need to fear or shy away from. I don’t think I can explain for sure what draws me to cemeteries. Perhaps it is the connection to the past that we as humans like to have. Perhaps it is just simply curiosity.

One of the most interesting visits I ever had to a cemetery was in Honey Horn, Hilton Head Island, SC. Now a museum, Honey Horn used to be a typical southern plantation. The original cemetery is preserved. It only had a handful of graves in it and some of the gravestones are now gone. The three gravestones that were there contained little information, but I could have spent a long time there!

A week ago, I had to opportunity to wander around a little church cemetery. It was shocking how many babies’ graves it held—and all from less than sixty years ago. Three graves that especially caught my attention were right beside each other, three little girls who shared the same last name (two of them definitely appeared to be sisters, but I’m not sure the third one was). One was born in August 1963, one in December 1964, and one in October 1965. All three died in December of the year that they were born, meaning that none of them lived to be more than four months old. It is times like those when I wish that gravestones could speak and I wonder, what stories would they tell? Sometimes the writer inside me makes up its own.