Cemetery Headstone Quotes

I'd been making desicions for days. I picked out the dress Bailey would wear forever- a black slinky one- innapropriate- that she loved. I chose a sweater to go over it, earrings, bracelet, necklace, her most beloved strappy sandals. I collected her makeup to give to the funeral director with a recent photo- I thought it would be me that would dress her; I didn't think a strange man should see her naked touch her body shave her legs apply her lipstick but that's what happened all the same. I helped Gram pick out the casket, the plot at the cemetery. I changed a few lines in the obituary that Big composed. I wrote on a piece of paper what I thought should go on the headstone. I did all this without uttering a word. Not one word, for days, until I saw Bailey before the funeral and lost my mind. I hadn't realized that when people say so-and-so snapped that's what actually happens- I started shaking her- I thought I could wake her up and get her the hell out of that box. When she didn't wake, I screamed: Talk to me. Big swooped me up in his arms, carried me out of the room, the church, into the slamming rain, and down to the creek where we sobbed together under the black coat he held over our heads to protect us from the weather.

I grinned, and a burst of shocked laughter shoved out of me. I'd done it! I'd beaten that bitch, and could see again. I'd won. With only my blood. I climbed to my feet, cradling my throbbing hand against my stomach, and looked out over the cemetery. The first real thing I saw was Silla, stumbling toward me. Her hands left scarlet prints on every headstone she touched.

The massive bronze gates were wide open now, too late. Inside, the cemetery had been turned into a grotesque place gleaming with high-powered searchlights, blue flashlight flares, winking pocket torches. Uniformed men were already swarming about. Red cigarette-embers showed oddly amidst the headstones here and there. ("The Street Of Jungle Death")

There were many deficits in our swamp education, but Grandpa Sawtooth, to his credit, taught us the names of whole townships that had been forgotten underwater. Black pioneers, Creek Indians, moonshiners, women, 'disappeared' boy soldiers who deserted their army camps. From Grandpa we learned how to peer beneath the sea-glare of the 'official, historical' Florida records we found in books. "Prejudice," as defined by Sawtooth Bigtree, was a kind of prehistoric arithmetic--a "damn, fool math"--in which some people counted and others did not. It meant white names on white headstones in the big cemetery in Cypress Point, and black and brown bodies buried in swamp water. At ten, I couldn't articulate much but I got the message: to be a true historian, you had to mourn amply and well.

Here in the forest lay sullen, soot-blackened stones that were the remains of ruined hearths; in abandoned cemeteries were dark headstones that had already half sunk into the ground. Everything inanimate—stones, iron—was being swallowed by the earth, dissolving into it with the years, while green, vegetable life, in contrast, was bursting up from the earth. The boy found the silence over the cold hearths especially painful. And when he came back home, the smell of smoke from the kitchen, the barking of dogs, and the cackling of hens somehow seemed all the sweeter.

we spent a sad afternoon burying her in the back garden of Francis’s house, where one of Francis’s aunts had an elaborate cat cemetery, complete with headstones

He walks back through the snow to his bicycle, then goes off to the cemetery, where he crouches down with his back against Alan Ovich’s headstone, smoking joints until the pain is soft enough to let his tears start to fall.

I remember asking how the world could continue spinning after such a tragedy. I wanted to scream at the cars driving past the cemetery. I wanted to yell at the birds in the trees casting shadows on her headstone. I wanted the grass to stop growing and the clouds to stop floating

But the death of spirit goes by another name. It is usually called the birth of reason. The dreams of reason are, at this late date, everywhere to be seen, much like headstones in a cemetery. The inertia of a standard which prunes every tree to the dimensions of a utility pole will, with the same determination, core the heart out of the human personality. This fermenting mind, intoxicated by its heady sobriety, methodically slits its own throat, all the while mistaking the elongating wound for a smile. When the spirit is free, according to Nietzsche, the head will be the bowels of the heart. In these top heavy days that have turned life topsy-turvy the head has little appetite for freedom. Instead it has developed a taste for coprophagy.

July I watch eagerly a certain country graveyard that I pass in driving to and from my farm. It is time for a prairie birthday, and in one corner of this graveyard lives a surviving celebrant of that once important event. It is an ordinary graveyard, bordered by the usual spruces, and studded with the usual pink granite or white marble headstones, each with the usual Sunday bouquet of red or pink geraniums. It is extraordinary only in being triangular instead of square, and in harboring, within the sharp angle of its fence, a pin-point remnant of the native prairie on which the graveyard was established in the 1840’s. Heretofore unreachable by scythe or mower, this yard-square relic of original Wisconsin gives birth, each July, to a man-high stalk of compass plant or cutleaf Silphium, spangled with saucer-sized yellow blooms resembling sunflowers. It is the sole remnant of this plant along this highway, and perhaps the sole remnant in the western half of our county. What a thousand acres of Silphiums looked like when they tickled the bellies of the buffalo is a question never again to be answered, and perhaps not even asked. This year I found the Silphium in first bloom on 24 July, a week later than usual; during the last six years the average date was 15 July. When I passed the graveyard again on 3 August, the fence had been removed by a road crew, and the Silphium cut. It is easy now to predict the future; for a few years my Silphium will try in vain to rise above the mowing machine, and then it will die. With it will die the prairie epoch. The Highway Department says that 100,000 cars pass yearly over this route during the three summer months when the Silphium is in bloom. In them must ride at least 100,000 people who have ‘taken’ what is called history, and perhaps 25,000 who have ‘taken’ what is called botany. Yet I doubt whether a dozen have seen the Silphium, and of these hardly one will notice its demise. If I were to tell a preacher of the adjoining church that the road crew has been burning history books in his cemetery, under the guise of mowing weeds, he would be amazed and uncomprehending. How could a weed be a book? This is one little episode in the funeral of the native flora, which in turn is one episode in the funeral of the floras of the world. Mechanized man, oblivious of floras, is proud of his progress in cleaning up the landscape on which, willy-nilly, he must live out his days. It might be wise to prohibit at once all teaching of real botany and real history, lest some future citizen suffer qualms about the floristic price of his good life. * * *

What had to be seen was that the Chris I missed so badly was not an object but a pattern, and that although the pattern included the flesh and blood of Chris, that was not all there was to it. The pattern was larger than Chris and myself, and related us in ways that neither of us understood completely and neither of us was in complete control of. Now Chris's body, which was a part of that larger pattern, was gone. But the larger pattern remained. A huge hole had been torn out of the center of it, and that was what caused all the heartache. The pattern was looking for something to attach to and couldn't find anything. That's probably why grieving people feel such attachment to cemetery headstones and any material property or representation of the deceased. The pattern is trying to hang on to its own existence by finding some material thing to center itself upon.

In ten days,” I said, “the United States will have elected its first woman president. The question at that moment will be whether the hate and division that surfaced during the 2016 campaign will be remembered as a last gasp of a defeated populace, clinging desperately to the old order they once ruled as it was swept away, or the beginning of a recalcitrant movement against American democratic pluralism.” Most members of the audience applauded with the same smug certainty that I was showing. One man, though, with a strong Central European accent, stooped over a cane, spoke to me afterward. “I have seen movements like this before,” he told me.”They are not so easily dismissed.” Like so many other members of the Washington cognoscenti, I had been dead wrong. I could justify it. Oh, Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by nearly 3 million; her 2 percent win was the largest of any losing presidential candidate since the disputed election of 1876. Had it not been for the Russians, or James Comey, or Anthony Weiner, or Jill Stein, surely she would have won Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, which she lost collectively by a smaller number than a capacity crowd at Lambeau Field. Perhaps all true, but I was wrong nonetheless. And since that miscalculation, the troubles have grown for Jews, leaping from the abstraction of the Internet to the reality of toppled headstones at Jewish cemeteries in St. Louis and Philadelphia, swastikas as graffiti, and bomb threats against synagogues and Jewish community centers, daycare facilities, and schools.

TWENTY-SEVEN acres of headstones fill the American military cemetery at Carthage, Tunisia. There are no obelisks, no tombs, no ostentatious monuments, just 2,841 bone-white marble markers, two feet high and arrayed in ranks as straight as gunshots. Only the chiseled names and dates of death suggest singularity. Four sets of brothers lie side by side. Some 240 stones are inscribed with thirteen of the saddest words in our language: “Here rests in honored glory a comrade in arms known but to God.” A long limestone wall contains the names of another 3,724 men still missing, and a benediction: “Into Thy hands, O Lord.” This

Anthony told investigators that he never saw Burke cry during their stay in Atlanta. Kaempfer advised that the only time she had seen him display some emotion and sadness was at the cemetery after the graveside services. He had left a group of people and went to the side of JonBenét’s casket, patting it gently. After that brief display of caring, Burke and Anthony went exploring, skipping through the headstones in the cemetery.

There is a distant figure standing in a higher part of the cemetery with her arms flung open and her head held high. Singing. She is singing. ..It is Sally. She is directing her performance towards a group of Italian graves...and is engaging with the headstones exactly as if they were her audience.

Perpetual Care The Perpetual Care fees for my mom’s cemetery plot got embezzled and now the overgrown weeds and wildflowers have their day. My mom never wore makeup, so I must believe she’s happier without the manicured grass. It’s the random rocks of memory that spill over her headstone she smiles upon. It is memory, not maintenance, that defines perpetual love; memories that can never be overgrown.

Century and after century, headstones and grave markers were crafted, marble shrines to lost life and to bodies that could neither see nor touch nor think nor feel, bodies that were respected and appreciated more after death than some ever could have hoped to be in life.

ON THE FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY OF D-Day, I was broadcasting from the American cemetery overlooking Omaha Beach at Colleville-sur-Mer in Normandy, one of the bloodiest battlefields in American history. The cemetery is at once haunting and beautiful, with 9,386 white marble headstones in long, even lines across the manicured fields of dark green, each headstone marking the death of a brave young American. The anniversary was a somber and celebratory

Bill was my nearest neighbor. His house lay right across the cemetery. In that cemetery was his headstone, erected by his family. They’d known Bill’s body wasn’t there (they thought he’d been eaten by a panther), but they’d given him a place of rest. It hadn’t been a panther that had attacked Bill, but something much worse.

We wonder what First Contact will be like. Hollywood imagines spaceships with laser beams blowing up buildings, or UFOs hovering over the White House, but I don’t think we’ve ever stopped to realize what First Contact actually means. My take might be overly simplistic, but Life from over there reaches out to Life over here. That’s it. Life understands that Life is important. And here I am, standing in a place of death, humbled by a life form from beyond the furthest reaches of the solar system. I’ve always thought of cemeteries as creepy—places to be avoided—but Sharon’s right. They’re a memorial to life. These aging marble headstones and cold concrete slabs show we care. We should never stop caring.

On my left, a cemetery edged in a weathered wrought iron fence. I think there were more than two hundred headstones. More dead than living. Nice.

Do you think your dad—” “Not yet, and no. But the sheriff and some state troopers were over. I heard some stuff. They think the body’s been in there at least ten or fifteen years.” Excited as she was by all the action, it also made her sad. “Can you believe that? Not knowing where your kid has been for the last fifteen years. Not knowing if she’s still alive or dead.” When Laura Lynn and Marcus exchanged a look, she frowned. “What?” “Do you know how many kids die around here? Or go missing?” When Mandy shook her head, Marcus continued. “A lot. Like, a lot a lot.” “How?” she asked. “Why?” “Lots of reasons,” Laura Lynn said. “Cancer. Running away. Murder. There are lots of stories like that. Kids going crazy and sent to insane asylums.” Marcus sat straighter in his chair. “I don’t believe all of them. Jake used to try to freak me out by telling me if I didn’t clean my room, all the kids from the mental hospital would escape and eat me alive.” He glanced to the side and shook his head. “What an asshat.” “Who’s Jake?” Mandy asked. “My older brother. He’s in college now.” Marcus started in on his sandwich, talking through a mouthful of food. “But he said his friend’s brother died that way. Some rare disease or something. Totally incurable.” “That’s pretty weird,” Mandy said. “Maybe that’s what happened to the girl in the septic tank,” Laura Lynn offered. “Maybe she went crazy and fell in.” “And what?” Marcus asked. “Her parents just closed it up and forgot about her? I doubt it.” “Then it was probably murder,” Mandy said. Another thrill went through her, but a twinge of fear followed this one. “We should look into it. Do our own investigation.” Laura Lynn and Marcus both looked down at their plates. Marcus was the first to answer. “I don’t know about that.” “What?” Mandy felt confused. She had figured at least Marcus would be into the idea, even if Laura Lynn wasn’t. “Aren’t you a computer genius? You could help me solve the case! We’d be heroes.” “It’s not worth it.” When he looked up again, he was deadly serious. “A lot of people have gone missing over the years, Mandy. Not just kids. It’s better to just keep your head down. Don’t cause any trouble.” Mandy blanched. When she looked at Laura Lynn for support, she saw her friend nodding in agreement. Mandy sat back in her chair with a huff, the turkey and cheese sandwich untouched. So much for showing Bear she could take care of herself by solving this on her own. 9 Bear pulled his truck next to McKinnon’s cruiser and put it in park. He hopped out and met her around the side of her car. “A graveyard? This is about to get real interesting, or real weird.” “Let’s hope it gets interesting,” McKinnon said. The slam of her door echoed through the surrounding trees, and the two of them trudged their way up a set of steps to the cemetery. Bear had passed it a few times as he’d driven around town. It was the biggest within a twenty-mile radius, but it wasn’t huge. The gravestones were crammed near each other, filling the entire plot of land to the brim. There was a short wrought-iron fence around the perimeter and a plaque that read “April Meadows Cemetery” in block letters. A few trees were scattered around, along with a couple of larger headstones, but most of the markers were small and modest. The paths were skinny and winding, as though they had been an afterthought. “What’re we doing here?” Bear

Rituals are infused with meaning. They are charged with significance because they have a crucial underlying purpose, whether it’s putting a small rock on a cemetery headstone to honor the dead, engaging in a rain dance to nourish crops, or taking Communion. Rituals take on a greater meaning in part because they help us transcend our own concerns, connecting us with forces larger than ourselves. They simultaneously serve to broaden our perspective and enhance our sense of connection with other people and forces.

BURRELL Cemetery is at the crest of a hill. Some of the gravestones go back centuries. The soft, weathered limestone is almost unreadable, like hard candy that’s been sucked clean. The grass is waist tall, luxuriant with only the headstones standing like tired sentinels.

We used to grow taro, bananas, sweet potato. Now we grew headstones. The only remaining place where Hawaiians were still a majority was in the cemetery. We were a species on the brink of extinction.

The heartache of seeing his only daughter go down a dark road devastated him so much so that he could never get the image out of his mind. Standing over the mound of dirt that covered his daughter’s body at the cemetery, he could see the rows of flowers that laid on top, regularly placed by him or other family and tribal members. Thomas refused to look at her headstone. It only enraged him and filled him with disdain, not for his lovely, lost daughter, but for those whose treachery engulfed her in the tragedy. They were the ones who betrayed Thomas’s trust.

A memorial park is a cemetery where there are no upright headstones; all the markers are flush with the ground, giving the appearance of lush, undeveloped land.

Adm. James Loy, commandant, U.S. Coast Guard: Maybe the fourth or fifth day, it dawned on me that the church at the end of Wall Street, Trinity Church, was within spitting distance of the Tower site and was part of the rest of the city that was deluged in debris. I sat in my office for a second and said, “Alexander Hamilton is buried in that cemetery.” He’s considered the founder of the modern-day Coast Guard because he established its predecessor, the Revenue Cutter Service. I couldn’t stand the notion that he and his headstone were probably inundated with debris. I called Master Chief Vince Patton into the office and I said, “Vince, I need you to get some senior enlisted folks from the captain of the Port of New York’s office. I know they’re up to their ass in alligators right now, but we’ve got to go fix that.” He got a senior chief in New York on the phone. They went and began the cleanup of the entire Trinity Church yard. The word got out to the Trade Center site, and people, after finishing their unbelievably difficult work for a 12-hour cycle, came over and joined with these Coast Guard people to finish the job. I was damned if I could go to sleep that night without doing something about it.

Blake’s grave lies half a mile or so from Slough House, in Bunhill Fields cemetery. It’s marked by a small headstone, also dedicated to his wife Catherine, and is out in the open, at one end of a paved area lined with benches and sheltered by low trees. The stone doesn’t mark the couple’s exact resting place, but indicates that their remains are not far off. Next to it is a memorial to Defoe; Bunyan’s tomb is yards away. Nonconformists all. Whether that was

As the librarian of the Buck Memorial Library, Geraldine Spooner, pointed out, the legend ignored many conflicting facts. Colonel Buck was described in the Bangor Historical Magazine as being a man of strong mind, retentive memory, and steadfast purpose. For instance, the Colonel was only a Justice of the Peace, not a Judge! He didn’t have the legal authority to pronounce the death sentence on anyone, much less his mistress. He was considered a righteous man of exemplary piety, who was respected by all. After all, in 1779 the Colonel had organized his own troops and, leading them, stormed the British garrison at Castine. This attack was repelled by the British, but Colonel Buck became a legend. The early history of Buckstown never had a bad thing to say about their Colonel. In March of 1795, the Colonel died and was laid to rest in the small village cemetery close to the tidal water, under a headstone that was inscribed to read “In Memory of the Hon. Jonathan Buck, Esq. who died March 18, 1795 in the 77 year of his age.

The two friends enjoyed wandering through this place. It was small. Only a city block. Unobtrusive. This was where some of the pioneer workers of Seattle were laid to rest. Laborers who worked in sawmills. Regular folk born when Seattle was a mill town. Regular working class, now buried under ground stones. These folk had to fight to simply survive. Remembered by their children and grandchildren, they worked for a better tomorrow for those they loved. These people had smiled, and danced, and hoped. They had lived. Now buried, most had no fancy education to show for their troubles. They were not part of the elite, yet those who lay here were great. These souls were not the most renowned or powerful, but were, in truth, the best of the world. As Zin and Obia wandered through, they saw various headstones were flat, unobtrusive, and resting in the grass. Right in the ground, without any markers.

was a miracle or due to the lucky ministrations of a doddering old doctor, I had no place in this reality. All I should have been by now was a name on a headstone, lost in rows of other headstones stretching as far as the eye could see in some faraway cemetery. That first morning, my mother dropped me off at Willowbrook High. That, like many other things these days, didn’t feel right. I should have walked. I should have ridden a bike, like so many other kids, pedaling along the roadside, their backpacks giving them a happy hunchbacked look. But my mother had

It bothered him that his father’s name would never be on the War Memorial in front of the Town Hall. It wouldn’t bring him back, but it would have been nice to see him honored. However, the United States hadn’t been at war yet, so Charles Curtis was just a name on a headstone in Pine Grove Cemetery. He was one of many Bound Brook sailors with empty graves who had been lost at sea. Like the minister had said at his father’s funeral: “They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters; These see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep.”” — BOUND BROOK POND: Cape Cod Mystery II (Bound Brook: Cape Cod Mystery Book 2) by Rick Cochran

Mentally, I made sure everything was how I wanted it. Granny had gotten her wedding officiant license so she could marry us, as I requested. The wedding was taking place in the center of the cemetery. There was a trail of black roses that led to two headstones. One headstone had Mason Neiman on it, and the other had Tylee Neiman. Granny would stand between both of our headstones and then marry us.