A walk in the cemetery

My friend and I visited his grave yesterday. He has made his plans and arranged for his disposition when he comes to his inevitable end. As we stood in the gentle breezes of the spring morning, we thought very deeply about our mortality. This is where we all end up, regardless of our efforts and accomplishments. No one, after a while, is really remembered. We join the ranks of the billions of our species who have ever lived and died.

We had visited the graves of his parents and a woman he once loved. As I looked around at the grassy hills around us, the vases and flowers and flags fluttering in the wind, I made the comment about how few of us will be remembered for long and that despite our machinations would become just another plaque among many others bearing names and dates that would not make a difference to anyone.

As we walked among the markers, we looked at the names and noticed those that indicated someone had a long life or a very short one. The graves of children impressed us the most, their brief appearances on this earth harkening heartbreak and grief for those around them.

The experience once again brought home that while I might try to make my mark, it is for naught. The best I can do is make today worthwhile for me and the people around me. More I cannot do. What good will all the strong feelings and opinions serve? What will all this writing come to?

When I walked to Helen, Montana, from my house at Gillham Park in Kansas City, I spent a good deal of time retracing the Oregon Trail. I took away much from the experience. In the vast expanses, I discovered how small and insignificant I am. The Plains will do that to a person. The place is enormous, the roads mere spider-like webs across the great blanket of prairie. Individual houses and small towns just specks on endless horizons.

Remnants of the Trail cut through naked limestone and lines in the sagebrush of the western Plains. Along those tracks lay small graveyards, the last resting places of victims of cholera contracted from tainted water. Some were victims of Indian and bandit raids. Others had died of the myriad of diseases and ailments that plague the species.

These tombs were often only outlines of stones or deteriorating cairns that would, in time, disappear under the nature swirling around them. Often, I found myself considering these plots, knowing they marked only a fraction of the deaths along the trail. The rest were unmarked or existed far from the side of the trail, unseen and forgotten in the native grasses and flowers. Still more were scattered by animals or decomposed to dust, disappearing in the prairie soil.

Along the way were also graveyards in and around the small towns and villages. Some were neat and well-groomed, the stones with names and dates in tended rows. Grasses and trees grew consumed still others. Stones there stood in odd angles or had fallen completely. Occasionally, a well-tended grave made its presence known among these ruins, testament to people who remembered their dead. How long would be determined by the length of the lives of those people who kept their ancestors in mind.

These remembrances, the efforts of the tiny creatures we are, showed me just how anonymous we become in death. A name marks a small piece of dirt among many other names, and all of them meaningless in among all the others. As a historian, I think about those people we do remember and how few of them there are among us. Almost 100 percent of us will never be known, aside from newspaper obituaries and a lonely stone among so many others. These, too, will be forgotten and lost after a few years. There’s nothing we can do about it.

My friend and I talked about those few in this cemetery, probably very rich people, who had mausoleums and grand monuments to themselves. We looked at the names, which meant nothing to us. So will it happen to us, even if we take all measures to the opposite. I would have liked to have a small narrative, a eulogy attached to each of the markers and monuments. At least then, for a moment, I would be reading and absorbing the story of a human being, what and who they loved and what they had done or how they had failed.

Even if I had such eulogies, the stories would blend one into the other, the lives intertwined in a civilization lost to the ages. They might make interesting reading. But the tale would only live in my mind as long as I remembered it, and even if I absorbed them into my being, they would only live as long as I did.

We talked about these things. I didn’t want my friend to think that his arrangements were meaningless and silly, as they are important to him and his kin right now. He took it well, satisfied that he had lessened the burden of his family and friends would endure upon his checking out of this thing called life.

I have been in the large cemeteries in Kansas City, Atlanta, and Washington, D.C. and dawdled in more than several small cemeteries outside of small towns across the Plains. In many ways they are the same. Rows and random assemblages of the living’s attempts to memorialize those we went before them.

When I was younger, my friends and I used to spend time in a small, wooded plot in the middle of a suburb. The graves under those oaks and elms were marked in part, eroded sandstone upon which the words could no longer be read. The older graves had depressions in the forest floor above them, the wooden coffin collapsed and become part of the humus decades before. We stood about the family cemetery drinking beer and thinking, long before we should have, of our own mortality.

These thoughts came to me as we stood at my friend’s last resting place. Here we are and this is it. Each of us are just moments in the long run of time. We may, as the ancients, become objects of study for those living in a future moment. Likely, we won’t.

What we have is a day, our relationships, our interests. They bloom through a life and die in the soil or a sprinkling of ashes. In the end, no one will remember me. I will have come and gone, done my part to despoil the planet, build or tear down the precepts of society. I hope to make this world a better place. But who is to judge, and even if judged, what difference would that make?

I turned toward home, another traveler among the commuters and errand-runners living their own lives. When I entered the house, I thought I needed to make the best of what I have. I called a friend, spread some love around my wife and kids. This is what matters. It’s all that matters.