A Visit to the Small Town Family Cemetery

Broadening our experience helps grief take its appropriate place in our lives

Today was another difficult day for my extended family. It was the interment of my uncle’s cremains in the small town cemetery which our family has utilized since the turn of the last century. Within its relatively small area, I can walk to the burial site of all four of my grandparents, six of my great-grandparents and a myriad of aunts, uncles and cousins related, in same cases, from both sides of my family.

I grew up making trips to the cemetery with my maternal grandmother, where we hand-pumped water from an old well and then carried it by the bucketful to water fresh plants surrounding the graves of loved ones. She would tell me about her parents, her own grandparents and assorted relatives throughout the cemetery. These forays to the burial grounds were not macabre or depressing for me as a child; they were very real reminders that human lives begin and end, and that we do ourselves a favor when we tend to our memories in tangible ways.

Several weeks before Claudia’s massive brain event that rendered her unresponsive, my mother’s sister’s husband had a significant heart attack, spent time recovering in a Minnesota ICU, and through sheer tenacity and medical attention, was able to be released from the hospital in time to return to his beloved church for Easter morning worship this year. We were all astounded at his recovery and rejoiced as he celebrated his own resurrection in the midst of Christ’s Resurrection Day. Sadly, his recovery was short-lived: he suffered an issue with his lungs, from which he was unable to recover, and he breathed his last on May 5th at the age of eighty-four.

Today was his graveside committal and interment in the family cemetery. Friends and family gathered around his burial site, the local United Methodist pastor shared Scripture and prayer and offered the opportunity for the group to bear witness to his life. It was a time of loving words and kind memories for a man who loved God, family and neighbor. He was not flashy or attention-seeking throughout his life, but each day he did something to give back to the world and the people around him.

It was another sobering moment for me. One of the local funeral directors, a few years older than I, has handled our family arrangements for more than thirty-five years. When I pastored in the area years ago, he and I had no grey hair, were more nimble on our feet and had few facial wrinkles. Today, that is not the case: we show our age in different ways because we are in a different stage of life. We greeted one another as though it had been just last week since we last talked, but it has been more than a decade.

As I stood in the cemetery with my own son, now thirty years old, I was once again reminded that as the oldest grandchild on my mother’s side of the family, I will one day be the patriarch of sorts. I will be the one next in line to depart this earth, with generations beneath me. The notion is both haunting and comforting.

I am haunted by the absence of so many I have loved in the past six decades of my life. All of my grandparents — three of whom I knew fairly well, the fourth who died when I was only six years old — are now gone. We said goodbye to my mother’s oldest sister many years ago — she was far too young when she died at the age of thirty-eight. Family friends, cousins and others I knew growing up are now “neighbors” together in this small town cemetery. The cemetery is, in its own right, a burgeoning community bearing silent witness to those we have loved over the decades.

Soon this is the place where my own beloved spouse and her righteous mother will find their permanent resting place as well. I anticipate there will be yet another chapter of closure for me when that day arrives this Fall, some sense of comfort in seeing grave markers with their names and dates, helping me to remember them with gratitude until one day my earthly remains shall join theirs.

Some of the comfort comes for me in realizing that the grief I bear is not unique to me. For generations my family has been saying goodbye to those we have loved, honoring their memory with burial in this small town cemetery and returning time and again as yet another loved one’s remains find a permanent resting place beneath the Northwood pines amongst the gentle rolling hills of north-central Minnesota.

As difficult as the pain of loss continues to be, there is something settling and appropriate in acknowledging the ebbs and flows, the beginnings and endings, the love shared and received, amongst those whom we no longer see. We grieve together — though in our own unique ways — as did the generations before us, and as will the generations who follow us.

This is life and this is death. One day it will be better, even if it will never again be the same.