ON CEMETERIES, "OUR TOWN," AND A CRESCENT MOON

When the day comes, I want to be cremated and not buried. It’s more efficient and less expensive, and it sidesteps the myth of some sort of resurrection that drives the motivation of many of those who prefer burial.  Having said that, burials have one distinct advantage.  Cemeteries serve to remind us of our own mortality and, more to the point, of the opportunities we need to take advantage of during our one brief sojourn.

Here’s an activity that I recommend:  Visit a local cemetery, not one where a loved one or someone of note is interred or one devoted to our fallen military.  Rather, simply visit one, perhaps in a local churchyard, that has been in existence for a long while.  Spend a little time reading the headstones, the names, dates of birth and of death, and any other inscriptions in memory of the deceased.  Check out not just those gravesites that others have visited recently, leaving flowers or other mementoes, but also those more numerous gravesites for which there is no evidence of recent visits.  Most likely you will not recognize any of the names on the headstones.  And, if the gravesites go back far enough, neither would anyone else.  That says nothing about the worth of the lives of such individuals, but it does speak, I think, to where the focus of our lives should be. 

A few years ago my wife and I visited the Capela dos Ossos in the Portuguese town of Evora, a chapel the walls of which are densely covered with the bones—and skulls—of some 5,000 monks, all of whom died several hundred years ago.  (For a few photos of the chapel, see my post on my Skeptic Photo blog.)   On another trip, during a tour of Stephansdom in Vienna we visited that cathedral’s catacombs.  This was not a scary tour, but it was a revelation.  We walked past thousands of human bones, again extending back hundreds of years.  What we saw were not individual skeletons.  Instead, there were dozens of stacks of human bones jumbled together.  In both instances these were the remains of individuals whose life stories are long forgotten. Those individuals may have lived 25 years or 85 years.  I am certain that they each had their moments of joy and of anguish.  They may have led inspired lives respected by friends and family, or they may have been reviled.  But they all are nameless now.

Where am I going with this short, a bit rambling essay?  Let me quote from one of my favorite plays, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town.  In the final scene, Emily, the play’s young, recently deceased protagonist, asks, wistfully:

Good-by to clocks ticking . . . and Mama’s sunflowers.  And food and coffee.  And new-ironed dresses and hot baths . . . and sleeping and waking up.  Oh, earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.  Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?

Wilder is reminding us that life needs to be appreciated in the moment.  And it’s not just the big events. Rather, it is the little everyday things--the sound of rain on the roof, the kindness of a stranger holding open a door for us, the expression on a loved one’s face in sleep.  

The other morning as I was driving to the local Starbucks to get my caffeine fix, I saw that not only was an especially brilliant Venus rising in the predawn east but below it was the nearly new moon sporting the thinnest of crescents.  The coffeeshop faces east and I told the barista that she absolutely had to take a moment to step outside to appreciate an opportunity that ten minutes later would be gone.  I am happy to say that she did and that another customer went out with her, as well.


© 2017 John M. Phillips