Grave Musings...

I walked through a small graveyard today. The headstones, berated by the weather, stood in fading acknowledgement to lives long since lived out. As I entered the restful site I encountered a thought as to the overall sameness that made the graves appear to me a cluttered mass of of concrete and iron fences as indistinguishable from one another as the decaying bones they housed. With growing agitation and yet mysteriously compelled into a revering silence I wove a destinationless path between the modest monuments, and I read. I cannot believe that death is, in itself, evil but only terrifyingly blind. Stone after stone bore names of infants so young to life one could have easily counted the number of their living breaths. Often mother and child were named together, joined as long as the words survive due to a tragic end to a new beginning for each. Other names were followed by dates to the front and back of seventy and eighty years. Many headstones had poetry, a phrase, and some only one word. These aging captions morbidly fascinated me, to think, and entire life layed to rest beneath the banner of a single word!! I did not think there existed such words, in the English language at least; to sum up a day in a word is a challenge at times, but a life? I wouldn't desire to make that particular choice of words... My ponderings carried me in a jagged circuit. As my interest grew so did the dawning awareness that I walked amongst what was much less like indistinguishable rubble and more like a crowd, with faces, real people. Some would find this alarming, I was endeared.