CEMETERIES - STORIES IN STONE

Post by Doris McCraw
writing as Angela Raines

Photo property of the author

Halloween, All Hallow's Eve, Day of the Dead are now over. We are into November and heading toward the holidays of Thanksgiving and Christmas. It is a time of celebration, cold in the Northern Hemisphere along with shorter days. Personally, I live for Dec 21 for the days begin to lengthen again.

According to history.com the tradition of Halloween originated with the ancient Celtic Festival Samhain when people would like bonfires and wear costumes to ward off ghost. By around the eighth century, Pope Gregory III designated November 1 as a time to honor all saints. The day soon became All Saints Day. As a result, the night before became known as All Hallows Eve which then became known as Halloween.

The day of the dead is a Mexican holiday that generally runs from October 31 through November 2. This is viewed as a time when family and friends gather to pray and remember those who have died to help them on their spiritual journey. They view this time not as a time of sadness but as a day of celebration. It is the time when the veil between the living and the dead is very thin and the loved ones awake and celebrates their journey with the living.

Photo property of the author

This time of year and the holidays we've just celebrated are special to me for two reasons. One that life is brief and two the legacies we leave are part and parcel of all of those who came before. For that reason and probably many more I love visiting cemeteries. For me, a cemetery is like reading snippets of books as I walked past the headstones. Even as a young person I found the stories of those who lived before me fascinating. Perhaps it had to do with the fact that I grew up in a farming community surrounded by multi-generations. I always loved listening to the stories of my great-grandparents, grandparents and yes even my parents. Many of those stories influenced and still continue to influence what I write about in both my fiction and nonfiction.

The history of cemeteries themselves, how they've changed over the years is also fascinating. Of course, there are the cemeteries that are associated with churches and hallowed ground. There are also the family cemeteries, those small plots at the ends of a road, or in the middle of a field of corn. In the case of those traveling west, the unknown graves of those who passed while on that journey from one destination to another. There were the cemeteries that were known as gardens, where people would come to picnic in the manicured settings. The commonality of all of these is the stories written on the stones. For that reason, cemeteries are a source of peace, quiet, and a place to help me understand where I stand in the stream of life and death. It is why when things feel out of kilter I will visit the gravesites of the people I've researched. Knowing something of their lives puts my own in perspective.

So when I visit Helen Hunt Jackson, Julia E Loomis, Harriet Leonard, and even Ernestine Parsons I feel connected to those women who ventured out and followed their dreams and in their own way left a mark on the world.

The novella "Lost Knight" came out from some of the ideas in this post. What happens when a man dies and wakes up centuries earlier? How does he navigate being in a time he knows nothing about?

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Doris Gardner-McCraw -

Author, Speaker, Historian-specializing in
Colorado and Women's History

Angela Raines - author: Where Love & History Meet

Books: Angela Raines Books