Story Cafe

February 18, 2012
Graveyards are Beautiful
There is a place¬ in every town and in every culture throughout human history that people fear and find creepy, a graveyard. Most graveyards sit forgotten and neglected. You could pass by one and never think that there was anything interesting or beautiful about it. People will look at you strangely if you said that a graveyard is beautiful. A graveyard is a place of beauty, where you can find art, history, culture, poetry, and so much more. They are relics to the past, present, and the future.
As a young girl there was something strangely attractive and fascinating about walking through a misty graveyard looking at the headstones. There were stones for the young babies. They had only held on to life for a few short days, months, or years. There were some for the very old. They had lived long productive and sometimes hard lives. There were some stones for the rich, the poor, the beautiful and, the plain and everyone in between, each person would wind up there someday. It may be why most people find a graveyard a scary ugly place. What makes it beautiful is that it is a place for everyone no matter whom they are or where they come from. In this chaotic world it is where you find peace and a quiet tranquility after a long or short hard life.
Some graveyards are hundreds to thousands of years old. Beneath the weeds and tangled ivy, or under the hot sandy desserts, you’ll find graveyards give us a glimpse of the history and culture of our ancestor’s lives. The headstones show what they believed in, what they found honorable, and respectful. They show you who a person loved and who loved them. They might read “A God fearing beloved wife and mother” or “Here lays a Hero of WWII, He gave his life to save others”. Gravestones tell us many things about people’s lives. The beauty of this is that their names may not have been put into our history books, but their history will be seen by any who venture into a graveyard to see it written on their headstone.
Graveyards also show us the beauty of a time period’s art and poetry. Most gravestones were created by hand by local artisans; the styles were as diverse as their cultures. Their designs varied from angelic cherubs surrounded by flowers to skeletal grim reapers. Some people even had sculptures of their loved ones made of stone so they would last forever. The art created on the gravestones would sometimes show what a person did for a living, such as an anchor or a ship for someone who sailed the seas or an ax for a firefighter. Poetry and verses are often found on headstones as well. The poems sometimes describe the beauty of life left behind or the sadness of death. Most are written by family members, like from a husband to his deceased wife, or verses taken from a favorite quote in the bible where etched onto the stones. There is even one in Main, where a poet named, Robert Browning, wrote an epitaph for, Levi Thaxter, a famous actor of the 19th century. Almost everyone would agree that art and poetry is beautiful. So wouldn’t art and poetry that has been put on gravestones be beautiful too.
Some graveyards are well kept with green rolling lawns of manicured grass and shrubs. They also have the headstones in long straight lines. People in some places even use them as parks, to walk in and ponder their thought in, or to have a picnic next to loved ones. Other graveyards are forgotten and overgrown. They have weeds and trees growing up, around and through the headstones. Nature is destroying and reclaiming the land around them. Next time you pass a graveyard whether it is old or new, stop and think that there is beauty here, even if it can’t be seen. They are a part of everyone, either by the past, the present, or the future. Graveyards are beautiful places indeed.