Cemetery Stones Quotes

The Celt, and his cromlechs, and his pillar-stones, these will not change much – indeed, it is doubtful if anybody at all changes at any time. In spite of hosts of deniers, and asserters, and wise-men, and professors, the majority still are adverse to sitting down to dine thirteen at a table, or being helped to salt, or walking under a ladder, of seeing a single magpie flirting his chequered tale. There are, of course, children of light who have set their faces against all this, although even a newspaperman, if you entice him into a cemetery at midnight, will believe in phantoms, for everyone is a visionary, if you scratch him deep enough. But the Celt, unlike any other, is a visionary without scratching.

One grave in every graveyard belongs to the ghouls. Wander any graveyard long enough and you will find it - water stained and bulging, with cracked or broken stone, scraggly grass or rank weeds about it, and a feeling, when you reach it, of abandonment. It may be colder than the other gravestones, too, and the name on the stone is all too often impossible to read. If there is a statue on the grave it will be headless or so scabbed with fungus and lichens as to look like fungus itself. If one grave in a graveyard looks like a target for petty vandals, that is the ghoul-gate. If the grave wants to make you be somewhere else, that is the ghoul-gate.

It's like a memorial to Atlantis or Lyonesse: these are the stone buoys that mark a drowned world.

Three years in London had not changed Richard, although it had changed the way he perceived the city. Richard had originally imagined London as a gray city, even a black city, from pictures he had seen, and he was surprised to find it filled with color. It was a city of red brick and white stone, red buses and large black taxis, bright red mailboxes and green grassy parks and cemeteries. It was a city in which the very old and the awkwardly new jostled each other, not uncomfortably, but without respect; a city of shops and offices and restaurants and homes, of parks and churches, of ignored monuments and remarkably unpalatial palaces; a city of hundreds of districts with strange names - Crouch End, Chalk Farm, Earl's Court, Marble Arch - and oddly distinct identities; a noisy, dirty, cheerful, troubled city, which fed on tourists, needed them as it despised them, in which the average speed of transportation through the city had not increased in three hundred years, following five hundred years of fitful road-widening and unskillful compromises between the needs of traffic, whether horse-drawn, or, more recently, motorized, and the need of pedestrians; a city inhabited by and teeming with people of every color and manner and kind.

We found James standing in front of the crypt, leaning against the side nonchalantly, like it was no big deal—like he hung out in cemeteries every day. Of course, working for Douglas, he probably had.

Twenty-two months are a long time and a lot of things can happen in them- there is time for new families to be formed, for babies to be born and even begin to talk, for a great house to rise where once there was only a field, for a beautiful woman to grow old and no one desire her any more, for an illness- for a long illness- to ripen (yet men live on heedlessly), to consume the body slowly, to recede for short periods as if cured, to take hold again more deeply and drain away the last hopes; there is time for a man to die and be buried, for his son to be able to laugh again and in the evening take the girls down the avenues and past the cemetery gates without a thought. But it seemed as if Drogo’s existence had come to a halt. The same day, the same things, had repeated themselves hundreds of times without taking a step forward. The river of time flowed over the Fort, crumbled the walls, swept down dust and fragments of stone, wore away the stairs and the chain, but over Drogo it passed in vain- it had not yet succeeded in catching him, bearing him with it as it flowed.

It is upon such stones that men attempt to permanently etch history so they will not exist in a vacuum; it is the final statement after a lifetime of scratching out divisions upon the ground, over ephemeral time itself, merely to give their short journeys meaning, to tell others “I was here – do not forget me, do not let my brief blast dissolve into nothingness.

All is indeed a Blessing IF you can just see beyond the veils; for it is ‘all’ an illusion and a test, and one of the greatest Divine Mysteries of this life cycle.” This IS my constant prayer, my mantra, my affirmation, reverberation, reiteration and my ever-living reality.

There were dozens of stones of all sizes in the small meadow. Tall stones, bigger than either of the boys, and small ones, just the right size for sitting on. There were some broken stones. The Runt knew what sort of place this was, but it did not scare him. It was a loved place.

There is an arch supported by four vast columns. Etched over hundreds and hundreds of yards of stone, furlongs of stone, there are names: "Who are these, these? The men who died in this battle?" "No. The lost, the ones they did not find. The others are in the cemeteries." "These are just the ... the unfound." When she could speak again. From the whole war?" The man shook his head. "Just these fields." Elizabeth sat on the steps. "No one told me. My God no one told me,

My Father, the Age I Am Now Time, which diminishes all things, increases understanding for the aging. —PLUTARCH My mother was the star: Smart and funny and warm, A patient listener and an easy laugher. My father was . . . an accountant: Not one to look up to, Ask advice from, Confide in. A man of few words. We faulted him—my mother, my sister, and I, For being this dutiful, uninspiring guy Who never missed a day of work, Or wondered what our dreams were. Just . . . an accountant. Decades later, My mother dead, my sister dead, My father, the age I am now, Planning ahead in his so-accountant way, Sent me, for my records, Copies of his will, his insurance policies, And assorted other documents, including The paid receipt for his cemetery plot, The paid receipt for his tombstone, And the words that he had chosen for his stone. And for the first time, shame on me, I saw my father: Our family’s prime provider, only provider. A barely-out-of-boyhood married man Working without a safety net through the Depression years That marked him forever, Terrified that maybe he wouldn’t make it, Terrified he would fall and drag us down with him, His only goal, his life-consuming goal, To put bread on our table, a roof over our head. With no time for anyone’s secrets, With no time for anyone’s dreams, He quietly earned the words that made me weep, The words that were carved, the following year, On his tombstone: HE TOOK CARE OF HIS FAMILY.

Only in a place such as this, in a cemetery with dropping willows and mist licking at the stones, could he acquire any substance.

Nothing that a stiff drink or a hard cock couldn’t cure. Or was it the other way around? I’m not sure.

Rather than let author and environmentalist Edward Abbey be buried in a traditional cemetery, his friends stole his body, wrapped it in a sleeping bag, and hauled it in the back of his pickup truck to the Cabeza Prieta Desert in Arizona. They drove down a long dirt road and dug a hole when they reached the end of it, marking Abbey’s name on a nearby stone and pouring whiskey onto the grave. Fitting tribute for Abbey, who spent his career warning humanity of the harm in separating ourselves from nature. “If my decomposing carcass helps nourish the roots of a juniper tree or the wings of a vulture—that is immortality enough for me. And as much as anyone deserves,” he once said. Left

I met Jose Angelico the way I meet many of my customers. I have a workshop on the cemetery road, just past the coffin makers. I specialize in the small, simple stone. I am very aware that my clients have next to nothing, and renting the grave has often taken most of their money. So I modify and modify and get down to the very lowest cost. The dead, however, must have that stone: the reminder, the eternal reminder, that this man, this woman, this child---existed. On some of the graves the name is marked in paint, or even pen, and everyone knows how sad that is. Make something out of stone, I say, and noone touches the grave.The poor are not buried, you see. There is not enough ground here any more, so in the Naravo they build upwards. The graves of the poor are concrete boxes, each just big enough for the coffin. They go up and up---in some parts twenty boxes high. A funeral here is to slide the coffin in and watch the sealing of the compartment. Part of my service is that I cement the stone that I've made into place, and thus seal the chamber.

Once upon a time there were two cities within a city. One was light and one was dark. One moved restlessly all day while the other never stirred. One was warm and filled with ever-changing lights. One was cold and fixed in place by stones. And when the sun went down each afternoon on Maximus Films, the city of the living, it began to resemble Green Glade cemetery just across the way, which was the city of the dead.

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.

The graveyard was at the top of the hill. It looked over all of the town. The town was hills - hills that issued down in trickles and then creeks and then rivers of cobblestone into the town, to flood the town with rough and beautiful stone that had been polished into smooth flatness over the centuries. It was a pointed irony that the very best view of the town could be had from the cemetery hill, where high, thick walls surrounded a collection of tombstones like wedding cakes, frosted with white angels and iced with ribbons and scrolls, one against another, toppling, shining cold. It was like a cake confectioner's yard. Some tombs were big as beds. From here, on freezing evenings, you could look down at the candle-lit valley, hear dogs bark, sharp as tuning forks banged on a flat stone, see all the funeral processions coming up the hill in the dark, coffins balanced on shoulders. ("The Candy Skull")

The grief of the stones was grief for every man killed in the building of the wall, for every man who died defending or attacking, for every man executed by being thrown off the battlements. “But those are our worst criminals!” the king protests, and the young man says, “That doesn’t matter to the stones.

The cemetery was vanity transmogrified into stone. Instead of growing more sensible in death, the inhabitants of the cemetery were sillier than they had been in life.

The cemetery was vanity transmogrified into stone.

He’d seen a lot of bizarre items left at gravesides, like a carton of eggs, a pair of reading glasses, a bag of licorice, smooth stones, a spoon.

I could not lay down the grief I carried, but I could name it for what it was, and by naming it ease the burden;

I’m more than the sum of my parts. I’m not the only dead girl on the dance floor.

A cult is a group of people who share an obsessive devotion to a person or idea. The cults described in this book use violent tactics to recruit, indoctrinate, and keep members. Ritual abuse is defined as the emotionally, physically, and sexually abusive acts performed by violent cults. Most violent cults do not openly express their beliefs and practices, and they tend to live separately in noncommunal environments to avoid detection. Some victims of ritual abuse are children abused outside the home by nonfamily members, in public settings such as day care. Other victims are children and teenagers who are forced by their parents to witness and participate in violent rituals. Adult ritual abuse victims often include these grown children who were forced from childhood to be a member of the group. Other adult and teenage victims are people who unknowingly joined social groups or organizations that slowly manipulated and blackmailed them into becoming permanent members of the group. All cases of ritual abuse, no matter what the age of the victim, involve intense physical and emotional trauma. Violent cults may sacrifice humans and animals as part of religious rituals. They use torture to silence victims and other unwilling participants. Ritual abuse victims say they are degraded and humiliated and are often forced to torture, kill, and sexually violate other helpless victims. The purpose of the ritual abuse is usually indoctrination. The cults intend to destroy these victims' free will by undermining their sense of safety in the world and by forcing them to hurt others. In the last ten years, a number of people have been convicted on sexual abuse charges in cases where the abused children had reported elements of ritual child abuse. These children described being raped by groups of adults who wore costumes or masks and said they were forced to witness religious-type rituals in which animals and humans were tortured or killed. In one case, the defense introduced in court photographs of the children being abused by the defendants[.1] In another case, the police found tunnels etched with crosses and pentacles along with stone altars and candles in a cemetery where abuse had been reported. The defendants in this case pleaded guilty to charges of incest, cruelty, and indecent assault.[2] Ritual abuse allegations have been made in England, the United States, and Canada.[3] Many myths abound concerning the parents and children who report ritual abuse. Some people suggest that the tales of ritual abuse are "mass hysteria." They say the parents of these children who report ritual abuse are often overly zealous Christians on a "witch-hunt" to persecute satanists. These skeptics say the parents are fearful of satanism, and they use their knowledge of the Black Mass (a historically well-known, sexualized ritual in which animals and humans are sacrificed) to brainwash their children into saying they were abused by satanists.[4] In 1992 I conducted a study to separate fact from fiction in regard to the disclosures of children who report ritual abuse.[5] The study was conducted through Believe the Children, a national organization that provides support and educational sources for ritual abuse survivors and their families.

All you have to do is convince the sanctimonious that they are free of all sin and they'll start throwing stones, or bombs, with gusto. In fact, it doesn't take much, because they can be convinced with the bare minimum of encouragement and excuses.

Er Lang examined his shoes in dismay. “You should have told me there was mud down here.” “Is that all you can say?” But I was glad, so glad to see him that I hugged him tightly. Despite his concern about his shoes, he didn’t seem to mind as I pressed my grimy face against his shoulder. “Last time it was a cemetery, and now the bottom of a well,” he remarked. “What were you doing anyway?” As I explained, his tone became icy. “So, you saved a murderer and let yourself be abandoned. Do you have some sort of death wish?” “Why are you so angry?” Pushing back his hat, I searched his face. It was a mistake, for faced with his unnerving good looks, I could only drop my eyes. “You might have broken your neck. Why can’t you leave these things to the proper authorities?” “I didn’t do it on purpose.” Incredibly, we were arguing again. “And where were you all this time? You could have sent me a message!” “How was I supposed to do that when you never left the house alone?” “But you could have come at any time. I was waiting for you!” Er Lang was incensed. “Is this the thanks I get?” If I had thought it through, I would never have done it. But I grasped the collar of his rope and pulled his face to mine. “Thank you,” I said, and kissed him. I meant to break away at once, but he caught me, his hand behind my head. “Are you going to complain about this?” he demanded. Wordlessly, I shook my head. My face reddened, remembering my awkward remarks about tongues last time. He must have recalled them as well, for he gave me an inscrutable look. “Open your mouth then.” “Why?” “I’m going to put my tongue in.” That he could joke at a time like this was really unbelievable. Despite my outrage, however, I flung myself into his arms. Half laughing, half furious, I pressed my mouth fiercely against his. He pinned me against the well shaft. The stone chilled my back through my wet clothes, but my skin burned where he held my wrists. Gasping, I could feel the heat of him as his tongue slipped inside. My pulse raced; my body trembled uncontrollably. There was only the hard pressure of his mouth, the slick thrust of his tongue. I wanted to cry, but no tears came. A river was melting in me, my core dissolving like wax in his arms. My ears hummed, I could only hear the rasping of our breaths, the hammering of my heart. A stifled moan escaped my lips. He gave a long sigh and broke away.

This was my thought as I followed her to the cemetery, pausing every few minutes as she and the children stopped to pick a handful of roadside flowers- weeds, for the most part- dandelions; ragwort; daisies; poppies; a stray anemone from the verge; a fistful of rosemary from someone's garden, pushing its shoots through a dry stone wall. Of course, Vianne Rocher likes weeds. And the children- the young one especially- lent themselves to the game with glee, so that by the time we reached the place, she had a whole armful of flowers and herbs tied together with bindweed and a straggle of wild strawberry-

When she told him about her cemetery walks, he gave a shiver of disgust and called cemeteries bone and stone dumps. A gulf of misunderstanding had immediately opened up between them. Not until that day at the Montparnasse Cemetery did she see what he meant. She was sorry to have been so impatient with him. Perhaps if they had stayed together longer, Sabina and Franz would have begun to understand the words they used. Gradually, timorously, their vocabularies would have come together, like bashful lovers, and the music of one would have begun to intersect with the music of the other. But it was too late now.

There was never any doubt that the local jury would return a guilty verdict. “In due time, gentlemen of the jury,” Seward concluded, “when I shall have paid the debt of nature, my remains will rest here in your midst, with those of my kindred and neighbors. It is very possible they may be unhonored, neglected, spurned! But, perhaps years hence, when the passion and excitement which now agitate this community shall have passed away, some wandering stranger, some lone exile, some Indian, some negro, may erect over them a humble stone, and thereon this epitaph, ‘He was Faithful!’ ” More than a century afterward, visitors to Seward’s grave at the Fort Hill Cemetery in Auburn would find those very words engraved on his tombstone.

When they had ended their prayers, the Angel of Death recovered his loquacity and his gayety and ascending the chariot again, preceded by Gil Gil, spoke as follows. 'The village you see on that mountain is Gethsemane. In it was the Garden of Olives. On the other side you can distinguish an eminence crowned by a temple which stands out against a starry sky - that is Golgotha. There I passed the greatest day of my existence. I thought I had vanquished God himself - and vanquished he was for some hours. But, alas! on that mount, too, it was that three days later I saw myself disarmed and my power brought to naught on the morning of a certain Sunday. Jesus had risen from the dead. There, too, took place on the same occasion my great single combat with Nature. There took place my duel with her, that terrible duel (at the third hour of the day, I remember it well), when, as soon as she saw me thrust the lance of Longinus in the breast of the Saviour she began to throw stones at me, to upturn the cemeteries, to bring the dead to life, and I know not what besides. I thought poor Nature had lost her senses.' The Angel of Death seemed to reflect for a moment... ("The Friend of Death")

I was the only one left in the tomb then. I sort of liked it, in a way. It was so nice and peaceful. Then, all of a sudden, you’d never guess what I saw on the wall. Another “Fuck you.” It was written with a red crayon or something, right under the glass part of the wall, under the stones. That’s the whole trouble. You can’t ever find a place that’s nice and peaceful, because there isn’t any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you’re not looking, somebody’ll sneak up and write “Fuck you” right under your nose. Try it sometime. I think, even, if I ever die, and they stick me in a cemetery, and I have a tombstone and all, it’ll say “Holden Caulfield” on it, and then what year I was born and what year I died, and then right under that it’ll say “Fuck you.” I’m positive, in fact.

I was the only one left in the tomb then. I sort of liked it, in a way. It was so nice and peaceful. Then, all of a sudden, you'd never guess what I saw on the wall. Another "Fuck you." It was written with a red crayon or something, right under the glass part of the wall, under the stones. That's the whole trouble. You can't ever find a place that's nice and peaceful, because there isn't any. You may think there is, but once you get there, when you're not looking, somebody'll sneak up and write "Fuck you" right under your nose. Try it sometime. I think, even, if I ever die, and they stick me in a cemetery, and I have a tombstone and all, it'll say "Holden Caulfield" on it, and then what year I was born and what year I died, and then right under that it'll say "Fuck you." I'm positive, in fact.

She has confided to her Aunt Daisy, for instance, that she can understand the genealogical phenomenon that as burst forth all around her. She finds it moving, she says to see men and women - though, oddly, they mostly women - tramping through cemeteries or else huddled over library tables in the university's records room, turning over the pages of county histories, copying names and dates into small spiral notebooks and imagining, hoping, that their unselfish labors will open up into a fabric of substance and comity. all they want is for their to be revealed as simple, honest, law-abiding folks, quiet in their accomplishments, faithful in their vows, cheerful, solvent, and well intentioned, and that their robustly rounded lives will push up against, and perhaps pardon, the contemporary plagues of displacement and disaffection.

A graveyard. It's the largest cemetery I've ever seen--a place Jack would surely love. A long rectangle of green lawn lined with rows and rows of old, moss-coated and weather-worn gravestones. Rain pounds the earth, and the cold tickle of air against my neck reminds me of the cemetery in Halloween Town. A feeling that exists in every cemetery, it seems. That hint of death. Of sorrow. Of lives brought to an end. But I don't have to go far before I find a small stone structure, an ornate mausoleum with spires along the roofline and a copper door, tarnished green from the rain. A tomb where the dead are placed to rest. I glance up the path, the cemetery glistening in the wet air. I have passed through many realms, all the way into the human world to a city made strangely silent, and now this mausoleum is my way home. My way back to Jack.

They stood looking down Brighton Beach Avenue, Arianna waiting for a signal from Slava. He glared at the doomed souls wandering past them, their legs varicose and bent, the jowls swimming in fat, bellies hung over the legs like overripe fruit. (Had Otto made his way down here, to see firsthand what he was dealing with in his folders, or did he prefer to keep his distance?) Yes, they weren’t easy to be near. The mesh bags stuffed with discount tomatoes, the lumbering bodies heedless of traffic lights, the threadbare emporia that had to traffic in furs and DVDs and manicures to squeeze from the stone of this life the blood of a dollar. And these were the honest ones. After fifty years of Soviet chatteldom, they had come here to get fucked in the ass for a little bit longer before packing off to a spot at Lincoln Cemetery, even this impossible to acquire without money being passed under the table.

They stood looking down Brighton Beach Avenue, Arianna waiting for a signal from Slava. He glared at the doomed souls wandering past them, their legs varicose and bent, the jowls swimming in fat, bellies hung over the legs like overripe fruit. (Had Otto made his way down here, to see firsthand what he was dealing with in his folders, or did he prefer to keep his distance?) Yes, they weren’t easy to be near. The mesh bags stuffed with discount tomatoes, the lumbering bodies heedless of traffic lights, the threadbare emporia that had to traffic in furs and DVDs and manicures to squeeze from the stone of this life the blood of a dollar. And these were the honest ones. After fifty years of Soviet chatteldom, they had come here to get fucked in the ass for a little bit longer before packing off to a spot at Lincoln Cemetery, even this impossible to acquire without money being passed under the table. They never even voted.

He had long since observed that Elizabeth had superfluous IQ for her line of work, and inside all that free space in her brain she was completing a philosophy of the world wove together out of all the smells she had ever smelled. Maybe her memory was not the longest. Every day she had to go over every line of it again from top to bottom, just like the day before. She was history-minded: she wanted a piece of ever dog who had come before her to every landmark, the whole roll call, every tuft of grass at the foot of the loading platform by the old natrium plant, every pile of boards or lost truck part in the fringe of weeds along the shore at the four-car ferry, every corner stump or clump of pee-bleached iris on the shaggy line where front yards ended in pavement. The one-time ice house. The Wheeling & Lake Erie water tower. Every boundary stone still standing, however crookedly, in front of the town cemetery. Where putting her own bit into this olfactory model of the world was concerned, Elizabeth was not demure but lifted her leg like any male dog, a little decrepitly now that she was old. Come outa there, Elizabeth. He didn’t want her pissing on the gravestones.

The 14th Tennessee, for example, had left Clarksville in 1861 with 960 men on its muster roll, and in the past two years, most of which time their homeland had been under Union occupation, they had fought on all the major battlefields of Virginia. When Archer took them across Willoughby Run on the opening day of Gettysburg they counted 365 bayonets; by sunset they were down to barely 60. These five dozen survivors, led by a captain on the third day, went forward with Fry against Cemetery Ridge, and there—where the low stone wall jogged west, then south, to form what was known thereafter as the angle—all but three of the remaining 60 fell. This was only one among the forty-odd regiments in the charge; there were others that suffered about as cruelly; but to those wives and sweethearts, parents and sisters and younger brothers who had remained at its point of origin, fifty miles down the Cumberland from Nashville, the news came hard. “Thus the band that once was the pride of Clarksville has fallen,” a citizen lamented, and he went on to explain something of what he and those around him felt. “A gloom rests over the city; the hopes and affections of the people were wrapped in the regiment.… Ah! what a terrible responsibility rests upon those who inaugurated this unholy war.

The cart slowed as they came to a place so dark and quiet that it seemed as if they had entered some remote forest. Peeking beneath the hem of the cart's canvas covering, Garrett saw towering gates covered with ivy, and ghostly sculptures of angels, and solemn figures of men, women, and children with their arms crossed in resignation upon their breasts. Graveyard sculptures. A stab of horror went through her, and she crawled to the front of the cart to where West Ravenel was sitting with the driver. "Where the devil are you taking us, Mr. Ravenel?" He glanced at her over his shoulder, his brows raised. "I told you before- a private railway station." "It looks like a cemetery." "It's a cemetery station," he admitted. "With a dedicated line that runs funeral trains out to the burial grounds. It also happens to connect to the main lines and branches of the London Ironstone Railroad, owned by our mutual friend Tom Severin." "You told Mr. Severin about all this? Dear God. Can we trust him?" West grimaced slightly. "One never wants to be in the position of having to trust Severin," he admitted. "But he's the only one who could obtain clearances for a special train so quickly." They approached a massive brick and stone building housing a railway platform. A ponderous stone sign adorned the top of the carriage entrance: Silent Gardens. Just below it, the shape of an open book emblazoned with words had been carved in the stone. Ad Meliora. "Toward better things," Garrett translated beneath her breath.

I opened my eyes. Thick columns of stone rose in the shadows toward a naked vault. Needles of dusty light fell diagonally, revealing endless rows of ramshackle beds. Small drops of water fell from the heights like black tears, exploding with an echo as they touched the ground. The darkness smelled of mildew and damp. 'Welcome to Purgatory.

The Ateneo was—and remains—one of the many places in Barcelona where the nineteenth century has not yet been served its eviction notice. A grand stone staircase led up from a palatial courtyard to a ghostly network of passageways and reading rooms. There, inventions such as the telephone, the wristwatch, and haste seemed futuristic anachronisms. The porter, or perhaps it was a statue in uniform, barely noticed my arrival. I glided up to the first floor, blessing the blades of a fan that swirled above the sleepy readers, melting like ice cubes over their books.

An old man sat down next to me on the bus and noticed that I wasn’t from around there. “Who are you looking for?” “Well,” I began, “there used to be a camp here.” “Oh, the barracks? They dismantled the last of those buildings two years ago. People built themselves sheds and saunas out of the bricks. Took the soil back to their dachas for planting. Put camp wire around their gardens. My son’s place is out there. It’s so, you know, unpleasant…In the spring, the snows and rains leave bones sticking out of their potato patches. No one is squeamish about that sort of thing around here because they’re so used to it. There are as many bones as stones in this soil. People just toss them out to the edge of their property, stamp them down with their boots. Cover them up. It happens all the time. Just stick your hand in the dirt, run your fingers through it…” It felt like the wind had been knocked out of me. Like I had passed out. Meanwhile, the old man turned to the window and pointed: “Over there, behind that store, they covered over the old cemetery. Behind that bathhouse, too.” I sat there, unable to breathe. What had I expected? That they had erected pyramids? Mounds of Glory?*4 The first line is now the street named after someone or other…Then the second line…I looked out the window, but I couldn’t see anything, I was blinded by tears. Kazakh women were selling their cucumbers and tomatoes at every bus stop…pails of blackcurrants. “Fresh from the berry patch. From my own garden.” Lord! My God…I have to say that…It was physically difficult for me to breathe, something was going on with me out there. In a matter of just a few days, my skin dried out, my nails started chipping off. Something was happening to my entire body. I wanted to fall down on the ground and lie there. And never get up. The steppe…it’s like the sea…I walked and walked until finally, I collapsed. I fell next to a small metal cross that was up to the crossbeam in the earth. Screaming, in hysterics. There was no one around…just the birds.

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

Here is the story, which I have abridged (with acknowledgement to Sergey Parkhomenko, journalist and broadcaster, who reported it): The River Ob makes a turn at Kolpashevo, and every year it eats away a few feet of a sand cliff there. On April 30, 1979, the Ob's waters eroded another six-foot section of bank. Hanging from the newly exposed wall were the arms, legs and heads of people who had been buried there. A cemetery at least several yards wide had been exposed. The bodies had been packed in and layered tightly. Some of the skulls from the uppermost layer rolled out from the sandbank, and little boys picked them up and began playing with them. News of the burial spread quickly and people started gathering at the sandbank. The police and neighbourhood watch volunteers quickly cordoned off the whole thing. Shortly afterwards, they built a thick fence around the crumbling sandbank, warning people away. The next day, the Communist Party called meeting in the town, explaining that those buried were traitors and deserters from the war. But the explanation wasn't entirely convincing. If this were so, why was everyone dressed in civilian clothes? Why had women and children been executed as well? And from where, for that matter, did so many deserters come in a town of just 20,000 people? Meanwhile, the river continued to eat away at the bank and it became clear that the burial site was enormous; thousands were buried there. People could remember that there used to be a prison on these grounds in the late 1930s. It was general knowledge that there were executions there, but nobody could imagine just how many people were shot. The perimeter fence and barbed wire had long ago been dismantled, and the prison itself was closed down. But what the town's people didn't know was that Kolpashevo's prison operated a fully-fledged assembly line of death. There was a special wooden trough, down which a person would descend to the edge of a ditch. There, he'd be killed by rifle fire, the shooter sitting in a special booth. If necessary, he'd be finished off with a second shot from a pistol, before being added to the next layer of bodies, laid head-to-toe with the last corpse. Then they'd sprinkle him lightly with lime. When the pit was full, they filled in the hole with sand and moved the trough over a few feet to the side, and began again. But now the crimes of the past were being revealed as bodies fell into the water and drifted past the town while people watched from the shore. In Tomsk, the authorities decided to get rid of the burial site and remove the bodies. The task, it turned out, wasn't so easy. Using heavy equipment so near a collapsing sandbank wasn't wise and there was no time to dig up all the bodies by hand. The Soviet leadership was in a hurry. Then from Tomsk came new orders: two powerful tugboats were sent up the Ob, right up to the riverbank, where they were tied with ropes to the shore, facing away from the bank. Then they set their engines on full throttle. The wash from the ships' propellers quickly eroded the soft riverbank and bodies started falling into the water, where most of them were cut to pieces by the propellers. But some of the bodies escaped and floated away downstream. So motorboats were stationed there where men hooked the bodies as they floated by. A barge loaded with scrap metal from a nearby factory was moored near the boats and the men were told to tie pieces of scrap metal to the bodies with wire and sink them in the deepest part of the river. The last team, also composed of local men from the town, worked a bit further downstream where they collected any bodies that had got past the boats and buried them on shore in unmarked graves or sank them by tying the bodies to stones. This cleanup lasted almost until the end of the summer.

The most curious garden burial was marked by a short, square stone with no identifying name, merely the number 5232. Beneath it three amputated legs had been interred, all from Union soldiers treated at Judiciary Square Hospital in May 1864. One of the legs belonged to James G. Carey, a private in the 106th Pennsylvania Infantry, who not only survived his operation but lived until 1913; the fate of the second solider, Arthur McQuinn, 14th U.S. Infantry, is unknown; the third, Sgt. Michael Creighton, a native of Ireland in the 9th Massachusetts Infantry, survived his amputation for two weeks but died on June 9, 1864. He was interred in the Lower Cemetery the next day, separated from his left leg by more than half a mile, which makes him the only person at Arlington with two

On her way to work the next morning, she is certain this will be one of her last days in Sarajevo. Looking around, she sees how the normal rhythm of the city has been broken and is amazed she didn’t make up her mind to leave before now. Bosnian Serb snipers lie behind sandbags on the tops of buildings and take aim at people in the streets below as if they are sparrows. Sarajevans - old, young, men, women, Muslim, Croat, Serb - dart across the roads in zigzags in an attempt to dodge the bullets. On the tram, passengers duck their heads in a wave when they pass in front of the Jewish Cemetery, where a snipers’ nest is known to be located. Disembarking, a series of blasts sound nearby and she freezes on the tram steps. The man behind pushes her off. They run to take cover in the stone-arched entrance of a locked-up carpet shop. Perhaps a dozen people press up against each other, coffee breath, perfume and the smell of their sweat intermingling. Each explosion sends a collective tremor through them. When they pull apart some twenty minutes later, they don’t look at each other. They brush down their clothes, straighten their shoulders and move off quickly. Zora stares after them, in shock. It’s a quarter to ten on a Tuesday morning. She can’t live like this.

Enter your wounds. Heal. Escape. And when you get loose, come join me. I'll meet you at Jim Bridger's grave as soon as you get there. We'll make music we can't hear alone, celebrate beauty yet to be born, take the devil by the horns and wrestle him to the ground. We'll shoot for the stars, sweetheart. We'll waltz in the moonlit cemetery like fallen Gods, stand revealed, naked as air, and kiss each other's scars. Till then, my invisible friend, this is the Dream Joker bidding you his tenderest toodeloo. Dream on." Denis Joyner, AMO Mobile Radio DJ

The wife Estelle’s stone sinks to the right. The dead here seem really dead, and bone lonely, unlike the graves in Italian cemeteries, bedecked with fresh flowers, red votive lights, and photos of the deceased.

monstrosities of tall "monuments" and draped urns. One of the latter, the biggest and ugliest in the graveyard, was sacred to the memory of a certain Alec Davis who had been born a Methodist but had taken to himself a Presbyterian bride of the Douglas clan. She had made him turn Presbyterian and kept him toeing the Presbyterian mark all his life. But when he died she did not dare to doom him to a lonely grave in the Presbyterian graveyard over-harbour. His people were all buried in the Methodist cemetery; so Alec Davis went back to his own in death and his widow consoled herself by erecting a monument which cost more than any of the Methodists could afford. The Meredith children hated it, without just knowing why, but they loved the old, flat, bench-like stones with the tall grasses growing rankly about them. They made jolly seats for one thing. They were all sitting on one now. Jerry, tired of leap frog, was playing on

When I was drafted into the army in April 1984, I was a nineteen-year-old boy. The club where they took us was a distribution centre. Officers came there from various military units and picked out the soldiers they wanted. My fate was decided in one minute. A young officer came up to me and asked, “Do you want to serve in the commandos, the Blue Berets?” Of course I agreed. Two hours later I was on a plane to Uzbekistan (a Soviet republic in Central Asia), where our training base was located. During the flight, I learned most of the soldiers from this base were sent to Afghanistan. I wasn’t scared. I wasn’t surprised. At that point I didn’t care anymore because I understood that it is impossible to change anything. ‘To serve in the Soviet army is the honourable duty of Soviet citizens” – as it’s written in our Constitution. And no one gives a damn whether you want to fulfil this “honourable duty” or not. But then I didn’t know anything about Afghanistan. Up until 1985, in the press and on television, they told us that Soviet soldiers in Afghanistan were planting trees and building schools and hospitals. And only a few knew that more and more cemeteries were being filled with the graves of eighteen- to twenty-year-old boys. Without the dates of their death, without inscriptions. Only their names on black stone … At the base we were trained and taught to shoot. We were told that we were being sent to Afghanistan not to plant trees. And as to building schools, we simply wouldn’t have the time … Three and a half months later, my plane was landing in Kabul, the capital of Afghanistan … We were taken to a club on base. A few minutes later, officers started to come by and choose soldiers. Suddenly, an officer with a smiling face and sad eyes burst in noisily. He looked us over with an appraising glance and pointed his finger at me: “Ah ha! I see a minesweeper!” That’s how I became a minesweeper. Ten days later, I went on my first combat mission.

Of that former time, all that was left were fleeting glimpses, visible only to someone who paid very close attention. Not long before she moved out of the county, Lewis remembered, she was walking up to a friend's front door and noticed faint inscriptions in the stepping-stones that led up to the house. It was only when she knelt down for a closer look that Lewis realized the path she'd been walking on was paved with remnants of black Forsyth. 'They [were] graveestones,' she said, 'from a black cemetery. Someone had dug them up and took them home, and used them for flagstones.

Of that former time, all that was left were fleeting glimpses, visible only to someone who paid very close attention. Not long before she moved out of the county, Lewis remembered, she was walking up to a friend's front door and noticed faint inscriptions in the stepping-stones that led up to the house. It was only when she knelt down for a closer look that Lewis realized the path she'd been walking on was paved with remnants of black Forsyth. 'They [were] gravestones,' she said, 'from a black cemetery. Someone had dug them up and took them home, and used them for flagstones.

Another persistent problem is that the Gothic ornament can become a maintenance nightmare. The cracks, joints, and attachments are a magnet for ivy, nesting animals, and moisture. It is rare indeed to see a Gothic structure more than a few decades old that doesn’t have some sort of ongoing structural maintenance problems.

My father often told me of the folkways of the shtiebel.   For one thing, you didn’t go to shul, the synagogue, at midnight. After all, the dead are pious Jews, and they too need to gather to pray. You just don’t want to be in their company when they do. When we put stones on the tombstones at the cemetery, we did this as a sign that the deceased was not forgotten, but that dear ones had come by to pay their respect. But for whom is this sign? After all, the living know they were there. The sign is for the dead, so that when they arise at night to chat among themselves, they can take comfort in having been visited and enjoy bragging about it to their neighbors. How do we stop the plague when it strikes the shtetl? We find an orphan boy and an orphan girl, bring them to the cemetery, set up a huppah, and marry them off. Their deceased parents will find rest for their souls in seeing their children set right in their lives, and their pleas to heaven on behalf of their children will surely bring an end to the plague.

Veins of ivy scale stones, find footholds but the caretaker cuts earth short, peels creepers from Cotswold rock and props the dead head to head so they won’t topple like drunks on their moss-soft shadows.

Side-Wheelers were built following the time sail ships were popular. It was a time when engineers experimented with various ways to transfer the thrust of steam engines to useful ways of propelling vessels through water. Side-Wheelers are a subspecies of paddleboats that were popular for a time, until it was determined that they were actually dangerous in heavy seas. Paddle steamers have a paddle wheel on each side of the ship’s hull making the vessel vulnerable to wave action coming in from abeam. If the seas were heavy enough the upper paddles could actually push water in the opposite direction from the ships heading, although the upper reach of the paddles were usually encased in a wooden housing. If the vessel rolled far enough the paddles or blades on one side or the other could come completely out of the water, thereby losing the necessary resistance. It was dangerous at best and was most frequently used on river boats. One of the best examples of a side-wheeler lost at sea was the sidewheel steamer Portland owned by the Eastern Steamship Company. It was 7 p.m. on Nov. 26, 1898 when Capt. Hollis Blanchard, convinced that he could outrun an oncoming storm and make it back to Portland in the morning left Boston. The 219-foot vessel had 120 passengers and 60 crew members including the night watchman, Griffin S. Reed of Portland. That night, hurricane-force winds and 40-foot seas blew up as blinding snow from two storms hit simultaneously and ravaged the New England coast. The Portland must been swamped by the violent sea just a few hours later. Although a ship’s whistle was heard on Cape Cod giving a distress signal of four short blasts, nothing could be seen through the heavy snow. Later that night bodies started washing ashore, late that night however. Many of the victims of the gale were laid to rest in the Portland Evergreen Cemetery. Griffin Reed’s body was never recovered however a stone has been placed in the cemetery in his memory. A total of about 400 New Englanders died in this storm still known as “The Portland Gale.” A hundred and fifty vessels, including the Portland sank in this ferocious storm leaving no survivors. In 2002, divers finally located the Portland in 500 feet of water. From her location, Highland Light, on Cape Cod, bears 175 degrees true at a distance of 4.5 miles.

That was always our solution, to go back in time. We discussed it the way others spoke of bone marrow transplants and radiation. [...] The dial was ours, and she would be at our mercy, just as she had always been, only this time we would pay attention and keep her safe. [...] We hoped that by preparing ourselves for the worst, we might be able to endure the inevitable with some degree of courage or grace. [...] Our mother was back in her room and very much alive, probably watching a detective program on television. Maybe that was her light in the window, her figure stepping out onto the patio to light a cigarette. We told ourselves she probably wanted to be left alone, that's how stoned we were. We'd think of this later, each in our own separate way. I myself tend to dwell on the stupidity of pacing a cemetery while she sat, frightened and alone, staring at the tip of her cigarette and envisioning her self, clearly now, in ashes.

All right,” I mutter, looking down. Bending over, I grab the weeds that have laid roots around his grave. I yank a few out and toss them to the side. Then, I brush off the top of the gray stone. “Well, that’s all I have to say. So…fuck off, old man.” And with that, I turn and head out of the cemetery, anxious to get to my car, to get to the club, to get back to the people I love.

At the time of her death, a crowd gathered to stop her burial, scared she would contaminate the cemetery; they even threw stones at her. The girl’s tomb was vandalized. But over time people came to see that she was working miracles, and now there are always flowers and candles and thank-you cards beside the gravestone.

We walked to a row of three stones: our grandmother and grandfather and, between them, our mother. There were crocuses and daffodils and snowdrops blooming on my mother's grave. Gran had always carefully tended it. After Sunday dinners, when we were little, Gran would put on her wide-brimmed gardening hat and gloves and take along her basket of garden tools and bring us down here. She would plant lavender petunias and purple bearded irises. She would deadhead the spent daylilies and pull up weeds on my mother's grave and on my great-grandmother Beulah's grave back in the corner. She barely touched my grandfather's grave, scratched in some monkey grass and ivy and told us even that was too good for him.

died—and he’d wondered how any man could claim to love a woman and then do that to her. David realized he’d stopped at the edge of the plantation’s cemetery. How many hopeful mothers lay beneath these cool white stones? Spanish moss waved from the oak limbs in the moonlight, rippling like shrouds awaiting fresh corpses. Tessa had nearly succumbed to a hemorrhage after Clare’s birth, and David had watched his own mother die of childbed fever.

I come to a stop when I see Death standing before a wide window, his gaze fixed on something outside. I swallow at the sight of those massive shoulders and large, folded wings. Right now, with his back to me and his posture so still, he looks like those stone angels I’ve sometimes seen in cemeteries. The ones that look painfully sad. The whole thing makes me shiver.

Angelus Rosedale Cemetery. The answers you need start here. Located across the street from the all-boys Loyola High School, Rosedale is one of the oldest, creepiest cemeteries in Los Angeles, with large tombstones shaped like pyramids and giant Celtic crosses. Famous people are buried beneath those stones—“Hurricane Hank” Armstrong, Hattie McDaniel, Rasputin’s daughter Maria, and Anna May Wong, just to name a few. Old Los Angeles is also buried here. Southern California streets, high schools, and cities have been named after the Slausons, Burbanks, and Fremonts now interred at Rosedale.

narcos, war on drugs, drug cartels, murder, crime, music, Mexico, violence Humaya Gardens has hundreds of other narco tombs in its sun-beaten soil. It is one of the most bizarre cemeteries in the world. Mausoleums are built of Italian marble and decorated with precious stones, and some even have airconditioning. Many cost above $100,000 to build—more than most Culiacán homes. Inside are surreal biblical paintings next to photos of the deceased, normally in cowboy hats and often clasping guns. In some photos, they pose in fields of marijuana; in other tombs, small concrete planes indicate the buried mafioso was a pilot (transporting the good stuff).

Humaya Gardens has hundreds of other narco tombs in its sun-beaten soil. It is one of the most bizarre cemeteries in the world. Mausoleums are built of Italian marble and decorated with precious stones, and some even have airconditioning. Many cost above $100,000 to build—more than most Culiacán homes. Inside are surreal biblical paintings next to photos of the deceased, normally in cowboy hats and often clasping guns. In some photos, they pose in fields of marijuana; in other tombs, small concrete planes indicate the buried mafioso was a pilot (transporting the good stuff).

could try to tell you the story, but it would be like describing a cathedral by saying it’s a pile of stones ending in a spire.

There’s a great mystery in that cemetery, even deeper than the painful or tragic events that populated it. Inside its stone walls are the citizens of my town: they built the stores and mapped out the roads, put up electric lights, founded the hospital, and organized the public library. A few probably lived in my home at one time. They have made my life possible in more ways than I can count, yet we are entire strangers. . . . I do not take these silent neighbors for granted either. Sometimes, when all of the library staff have gone home, the lights are off, and I’m working alone at my desk, I think about them . . . . But most of the time, my feeling is more sadness than fear. It is hard to think about people who have lived full and eventful lives, only to end up as a faded name on a monument; it is even harder to realize that this will eventually happen to me and to all the people I love. My library shelves are full of forgotten books written by unknown people. It is an amazing fact, one that I sometimes contemplate with awe, that all of these books are connections with people now on the other side of mystery, surviving only as a name on a tattered binding. That’s one reason why I sometimes pause and say their names out loud, just to give the universe a chance to hear an old and beloved combination of words one more time. (pp. 100-101)

I could try to tell you the story, but it would be like describing a cathedral by saying it’s a pile of stones ending in a spire.

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

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.

A walk I took among rambling ivy and heathers, to catch a glimpse of the swollen moon. I witnessed her giving birth to phantoms, shadows sisters; daring to tell her my loneliness, heart never knowing love, body absent of experiencing any cardinal ecstasy. ~ My one love took another, with a sardonic expression upon an otherwise innocent face, in front of me. For it seemed to be the season of ice for me; Heart caught in a maelstrom of icy crystals, inevitably, entered paralyzing sorrow. ~ No, No! ~ A walk I took meandering around, I recall feeling restless; till I reached a decrepit cemetery I’ve never seen before; atop of a strange hill. Yew trees guarded sleeping souls; lying next to their beloved, or strangers. ~ Dewdrops from a Fae’s wand glistened upon enchanter’s nightshade; entangled within the thorns from briar roses. ~ I sat upon an ancient moss covered, stone bench. Pungent earth, dampness surrounded me, inquisitive owls stared at me. My heart cried its lament, to forever be alone, my heart will never find its love’s home. . dormiveglia: pt. i :  2021: all rights reserved

the old church where generations of my ancestors may have worshipped, where prayers had been spoken and hearts broken and healed, it all made sense for a small moment. Religion made sense, if only to add context to the struggle of life and death. The church was a monument to what had been, a connection to the past that comforted those in the present, and it comforted me. I climbed the slope beyond the church to where the cemetery stretched. It overlooked the spires and the winding road I’d just traveled. Some of the stones were tipped or sunken; some were so covered with lichen and time that I couldn’t make out names or dates. Other plots were new, lined by rocks and filled in with mementos. The newer plots,

I know this village street by street, house by house; I know too the ten domed shrines that stand in the middle of the cemetery on the edge of the desert high at the top of the village; the graves too I know one by one, having visited them with my grandfather. I know those too who inhabit these graves, both those who died before my father was born and those who have died since my birth. I have walked in more than a hundred funeral processions, have helped with the digging of the grave and have stood alongside it in the crush of people as the dead man was cushioned around with stones and the earth heaped in around him. I have done this in the early mornings, in the intensity of the noonday heat in the summer months, and at night with lamps in our hands.