A Little MS with a Little MSW

I walked through a really pretty cemetery recently. Vast and hilly, this stretch of land held close to 10,000 gravestones – many dating back to the 1800’s. Literally thousands of memorials of the deceased, and I only counted three with fresh flowers. Three souls with whispers of remembrances. Three pops of color in a sea of gray epitaphs.

Cemeteries are at once sacred and ominous spaces. We are taught to show respect for the dead, to never speak ill of them. As I walked this ground on which I had been commanded to respect, it struck me that death was the only thing some of these poor souls had accomplished that the living deemed worthy of esteem.

I find cemeteries hauntingly beautiful. They are the only spaces on earth where death outnumbers life. The air around gravestones swirls with stale tears and the echoes of stories shared by loved ones that have no ears on which to land. I would say that they fell on dead ears, but RESPECT! A story about cemeteries is no place to insert jokes.

Seriously, though, I thought a lot about the fact that some of these dead people were likely just plain ol’ mean. Maybe even evil. It’s possible they spent 80+ years on this earth being a colossal ass. But we often don’t speak in truth, even in death. I saw some massive monuments. I guess we are meant to assume the bigger the memorial, the better the human.

It would be much easier for us honest-to-a-fault humans to fit the letters C-O-L-O-S-S-A-L A-S-S on a monument, than a little tiny knub of a rock. I’m just sayin’. But after all that walking and thinking about mean people, this is what struck me most during my walk among the dead: the little pops of color.

The fresh flowers served as a reminder to me that to the world you might just be one person, but to one person, you just might be the world