Monuments to Life

Cemeteries are intriguing places, filled with sorrow, hope, and a peacefulness not found elsewhere. Yet, as in life, there is a hierarchy here, a need to prove that one existed, that one had a life of importance that has carried on beyond the grave. Just as teens paint “I was here” on notebooks, overpasses, and sidewalks, so here the tombstones beg passersby to notice “I was here” and I was of value, significance.



In life, we display our importance to the world by owning the biggest house, the fastest car; in death we display the significant of our life’s contributions with the tallest or widest monument. In life, we struggle to define our person by our occupation, our family role, our age, or our political beliefs; in death, we are immortalized as a mother, father, or a child, a mason, town founder, scientist, or possibly a soldier, a hero.



The rumors and reputations that others projected on to us in life follow us to our resting places, often exaggerated toward the positive or the negative. The truth of one’s life becomes relative to the person remembering it.



Yet, we are still dead, unable to work on any unfinished business we may have left behind and, possibly, able to feel the unending regret of such. Cemeteries may hold not the ghosts of the deceased but the ghosts of love never found, dreams never chased, chances never taken.



But everyone in every cemetery was alive, was someone of value in their own way, regardless of how high they rose up the corporate ladder or whether or not they saved the town from financial ruin. Each one was a Somebody that was important to another, even if this was unknown, unrecognized, or unacknowledged.



The living have much to learn from the dead, primarily that we should take our chances while we are still alive, though our fear may be great and our fortitude shaky, so that we may overcome our need to prove to others our significance and simply be.



Could it be that the most important lessons the dead have to teach the living is to believe, in the here and now, “I am here,” and “I am worthy.”