Grave Markers Quotes

Blasted grave marker. There sure are a bloody lot of them. They've got some nerve burying all these dead people here.

She could just imagine, all her friends and family mourning around her grave. The tombstone would read Kari Wagner, Died of Sheer Stupidity. It would be almost as bad to have her grave marker read Died of Terminal Bedroom Boredom.

Gavin saw a grave purely as a marker for the place where a corpse was decomposing; a nasty thought, yet people took it into their heads to visit and bring flowers, as though it might yet recover.

A Kite is a Victim A kite is a victim you are sure of. You love it because it pulls gentle enough to call you master, strong enough to call you fool; because it lives like a desperate trained falcon in the high sweet air, and you can always haul it down to tame it in your drawer. A kite is a fish you have already caught in a pool where no fish come, so you play him carefully and long, and hope he won't give up, or the wind die down. A kite is the last poem you've written so you give it to the wind, but you don't let it go until someone finds you something else to do. A kite is a contract of glory that must be made with the sun, so you make friends with the field the river and the wind, then you pray the whole cold night before, under the travelling cordless moon, to make you worthy and lyric and pure. Gift You tell me that silence is nearer to peace than poems but if for my gift I brought you silence (for I know silence) you would say This is not silence this is another poem and you would hand it back to me There are some men There are some men who should have mountains to bear their names through time Grave markers are not high enough or green and sons go far away to lose the fist their father’s hand will always seem I had a friend he lived and died in mighty silence and with dignity left no book son or lover to mourn. Nor is this a mourning song but only a naming of this mountain on which I walk fragrant, dark and softly white under the pale of mist I name this mountain after him. -Believe nothing of me Except that I felt your beauty more closely than my own. I did not see any cities burn, I heard no promises of endless night, I felt your beauty more closely than my own. Promise me that I will return.- -When you call me close to tell me your body is not beautiful I want to summon the eyes and hidden mouths of stone and light and water to testify against you.- Song I almost went to bed without remembering the four white violets I put in the button-hole of your green sweater and how i kissed you then and you kissed me shy as though I'd never been your lover -Reach into the vineyard of arteries for my heart. Eat the fruit of ignorance and share with me the mist and fragrance of dying.-

This is the part no one talks about anymore. Not in civilized company at least. When a war is over, you stop discussing the cost. The reality. The blood-soaked soil or the grave markers or the collateral damage. The ways we kill our enemies in order to claim victory. History is written by the men who live. Not the ones who die. But I’ve heard these stories myself.

They don't make morgues with windows. In fact, if the geography allows for it, they hardly ever make morgues above the ground. I guess it's partly because it must be eisier to refrigerate a bunch of coffin-sized chambers in a room insulated by the earth. But that can't be all there is to it. Under the earth means a lot more than relative altitude. It's where dead things fit. Graves are under the earth. So are Hell, Gehenna, Hades, and a dozen other reported afterlives. Maybe it says somthing about people. Maybe for us, under the earth is a subtle and profound statement. Maybe ground level provides us with a kind of symbolic boundary marker, an artificial construct that helps us remember that we are alive. Mabye it helps us push death's shadow back from our lives. I live in a basement apartment and like it. What does that say about me? Probably that I overanalyze things.

The newest animal Route 5 had used up, it seemed, was my daughter’s beloved pet. We buried Smucky in the pet sematary. My daughter made the grave marker, which read Smucky: He was obediant. (Smucky wasn’t in the least obedient, of course; he was a cat, for heaven’s sake.)

Americans make more trash than anyone else on the planet, throwing away about 7.1 pounds per person per day, 365 days a year. Across a lifetime that rate means, on average, we are each on track to generate 102 tons of trash. Each of our bodies may occupy only one cemetery plot when we’re done with this world, but a single person’s 102-ton trash legacy will require the equivalent of 1,100 graves. Much of that refuse will outlast any grave marker, pharaoh’s pyramid or modern skyscraper: One of the few relics of our civilization guaranteed to be recognizable twenty thousand years from now is the potato chip bag.

N.F.F.N.S.N.C. Non Fui; Fui; Non Sum; Non Curo. “I was not, I was, I am not, I care not.” It's a Latin saying found on Roman grave markers. It means I wasn’t bothered about not existing before I existed and I’m not bothered about not existing now that I don’t exist.

The juniper tree looked as stolid as a grave marker, unruffled. Under the dirt was the compact and inside the compact was the black sand and in every grain of sand was Sevas, my first secret, my first lie, safe as death.

As the last human lay dying in their shallow grave, they fashioned a crude grave marker from wood. It read: "Man - Terroriser of Fish and Great Destroyer of all he made, found or was gifted." They then covered themselves with earth and quietly passed away. Seeing this, God left the Universe and took the Sun with him.

The driving aesthetic of military style is uniformity. Whence the word uniform. From first inspection to Arlington National Cemetery, soldiers look like those around them: same hat, same boots, identical white grave marker. They are discouraged from looking unique, because that would encourage them to feel unique, to feel like an individual. The problem with individuals is that they think for themselves and of themselves, rather than for and of their unit. They’re the lone goldfish on the old Pepperidge Farm bags, swimming the other way. They’re a problem.

...a gun was a marker on the journey of death, and was to be respected as such, like a coffin or a grave or a meal in winter, not to be foolish with...

This section of Scripture reminds me of the rows of white crosses along the wind-swept hills of Normandy. We’re free today because, in June 1944, during the three-month battle of Normandy, nearly fifty-three thousand “nobodies” paid the ultimate price to defeat Nazi tyranny. No fewer than 9, 387 grave markers overlook Omaha Beach, many of them bearing the names of men who died during the first hours of the invasion called D-day. Beneath every white marker lies a person of significance because each one had an impact on the rest of history; each one made a difference. It’s a very moving place to be. Visitors to that patch of land near Colleville-sur Mer, France, frequently weep quietly because there the real heroes of the war are silently honored.

The green painted concrete out in front of the house, which at first seemed like a novel way to save money on lawn-moving, was now just plain depressing. The hot water came reluctantly to the kitchen sink as if from miles away, and even then without conviction, and sometimes a pale brownish color. Many of the windows wouldn't open properly to let flies out. Others wouldn't shut properly to stop them getting in. The newly planted fruit trees died in the sandy soil of a too-bright backyard and were left like grave-markers under the slack laundry lines, a small cemetery of disappointment. It appeared to be impossible to find the right kinds of food, or learn the right way to say even simple things. The children said very little that wasn't a complaint.

walk in the churchyard a little, looking for signs of spring. He was not disappointed. Here shy violets peeped from near the wall. There were the first leaves of the primroses that would soon spread themselves between the grave markers. Soon there would be daisies, wild carrot and all manner of other flowers to delight the bees. What men designated a place of death, nature ever filled with abundant life.

Carolyn had told me that while he was still able, Bob had arranged to have his favorite words from his favorite work of Dickens inscribed on his grave marker, but still I was unprepared for their effect when actually seen. Engraved across the granite face of the footstone was the epitaph by which Bob DeMatteis had chosen to be remembered: "And it was always said of him that he knew how to keep Christmas well.

book. Blaze makes a point of sitting behind me in the next class, and it takes every fiber in my being to ignore the cut-up eraser she throws at my head. My jaw ticks when a marker cap hits my ear. I'm woefully disappointed

When autumn gusts blew in from the Rideau Lakes, parched brown leaves swirled and scattered around the sides of the neglected building, forming mounds like grave-markers, for ghosts of the past, who lingered on the dust-covered dance floor.

His oldest child from his second marriage, Matthew, stayed up all the night before he was buried, putting his father’s history on a wooden tombstone. He began with his father’s name on the first line, and on the next, he put the years ofhis father’s coming and going. Then all the things he knew his father had been. Husband. Father. Farmer. Grandfather. Patroller. Tobacco Man. Tree Maker. The letters ofthe words got smaller and smaller as the boy, not quite twelve, neared the bottom ofthe wood because he had never made a headstone for anyone before so he had not compensated for all that he would have to put on it. The boy filled up the whole piece ofwood and at the end of the last line he put a period. His father’s grave would remain, but the wooden marker would not last out the year. The boy knew better than to put a period at the end ofsuch a sentence. Something that was not even a true and proper sentence, with subject aplenty, but no verb to pull it all together. A sentence, Matthew’s teacher back in Virginia had tried to drum into his thick Kinsey head, could live without a subject, but it could not live without a verb.

The living room is overgrown with grass. It has come up around the furniture. It stretches through the dining room, past the swinging door into the kitchen. It extends for miles and miles into the walls... There's treasure in the grass, things dropped or put there; a stick of rust that was once a penknife, a grave marker...All hidden in the grass at the scalp of the meadow. In a cellar under the grass an old man sits in a rocking chair, rocking to and fro. In his arms he holds an infant, the infant body of himself. And he rocks to and fro under the grass in the dark.

On one occasion when she was feeling edgy and exhausted and her cartilage ached the way it sometimes did, she stopped off at the memorial park on her way home. It was the biggest public open space in the country. She drove up and down the long rows of granite grave markers set flush to the grass singing, “If you are going to San Francisco,” thinking about smothering Byrdie and taking the car and just running away. Her life could start over as it was meant to start – but how was that, pray tell? As a lesbian? What about those two or three months of fixation on sleeping with Lee? Is that what lesbians do? She looked back at Byrdie asleep on the back bench seat and said, “Byrdie boy, I love you so much.

The master bedchamber at the top of a flight of badly worn and mossy stone steps, overlaid with grime, and the hard-dried excrement and remains of vermin—overlooking, from its single (barred) window, a marshy graveyard, the aged markers tilted and filthy from neglect, spiky grasses growing all around, and pools of brackish water interspersed among the graves.

THE FINEST STORY IN THE WORLD" "Or ever the knightly years were gone      With the old world to the grave, I was a king in Babylon      And you were a Christian slave,"         —W.E. Henley. His name was Charlie Mears; he was the only son of his mother who was a widow, and he lived in the north of London, coming into the City every day to work in a bank. He was twenty years old and suffered from aspirations. I met him in a public billiard-saloon where the marker called him by his given name, and he called the marker "Bullseyes." Charlie explained, a little nervously, that he had only come to the place to look on, and since looking on at games of skill is not a cheap amusement for the young, I suggested that Charlie should go back to his mother.

When someone dies, we spend so much time looking for an explanation. The rest of the time we spend making sure we won't forget them. So we build statues. Hold memorials. Visit graves. All of these physical markers that make it impossible to forget. But what if it's the opposite? What if the only way we can really remember is if we stop looking to the past? Maybe then they'll become more them and less us.

There, a simple headstone marked the grave of Eva Saloman Johansen, "beloved wife and grandmother." Tess was intrigued to see a phrase in Hebrew characters. Her paternal grandmother had apparently been Jewish. Beside that was a marker for Erik Karl Johansen, inscribed, 'Measure his life not by its length but by the depths of joy he brought us. He jumped into life and never touched bottom. We will never laugh the same again.

The plane banked, and he pressed his face against the cold window. The ocean tilted up to meet him, its dark surface studded with points of light that looked like constellations, fallen stars. The tourist sitting next to him asked him what they were. Nathan explained that the bright lights marked the boundaries of the ocean cemeteries. The lights that were fainter were memory buoys. They were the equivalent of tombstones on land: they marked the actual graves. While he was talking he noticed scratch-marks on the water, hundreds of white gashes, and suddenly the captain's voice, crackling over the intercom, interrupted him. The ships they could see on the right side of the aircraft were returning from a rehearsal for the service of remembrance that was held on the ocean every year. Towards the end of the week, in case they hadn't realised, a unique festival was due to take place in Moon Beach. It was known as the Day of the Dead... ...When he was young, it had been one of the days he most looked forward to. Yvonne would come and stay, and she'd always bring a fish with her, a huge fish freshly caught on the ocean, and she'd gut it on the kitchen table. Fish should be eaten, she'd said, because fish were the guardians of the soul, and she was so powerful in her belief that nobody dared to disagree. He remembered how the fish lay gaping on its bed of newspaper, the flesh dark-red and subtly ribbed where it was split in half, and Yvonne with her sleeves rolled back and her wrists dipped in blood that smelt of tin. It was a day that abounded in peculiar traditions. Pass any candy store in the city and there'd be marzipan skulls and sugar fish and little white chocolate bones for 5 cents each. Pass any bakery and you'd see cakes slathered in blue icing, cakes sprinkled with sea-salt.If you made a Day of the Dead cake at home you always hid a coin in it, and the person who found it was supposed to live forever. Once, when she was four, Georgia had swallowed the coin and almost choked. It was still one of her favourite stories about herself. In the afternoon, there'd be costume parties. You dressed up as Lazarus or Frankenstein, or you went as one of your dead relations. Or, if you couldn't think of anything else, you just wore something blue because that was the colour you went when you were buried at the bottom of the ocean. And everywhere there were bowls of candy and slices of special home-made Day of the Dead cake. Nobody's mother ever got it right. You always had to spit it out and shove it down the back of some chair. Later, when it grew dark, a fleet of ships would set sail for the ocean cemeteries, and the remembrance service would be held. Lying awake in his room, he'd imagine the boats rocking the the priest's voice pushed and pulled by the wind. And then, later still, after the boats had gone, the dead would rise from the ocean bed and walk on the water. They gathered the flowers that had been left as offerings, they blew the floating candles out. Smoke that smelt of churches poured from the wicks, drifted over the slowly heaving ocean, hid their feet. It was a night of strange occurrences. It was the night that everyone was Jesus... ...Thousands drove in for the celebrations. All Friday night the streets would be packed with people dressed head to toe in blue. Sometimes they painted their hands and faces too. Sometimes they dyed their hair. That was what you did in Moon Beach. Turned blue once a year. And then, sooner or later, you turned blue forever.

Reading in an essay by a white folklorist that Hurston was buried in an unmarked grave, Walker decided that such a fate was an insult to Hurston and began her search for the grave to put a marker on it. In a personal essay, "In search of Zora Neale Hurston," written for Ms. magazine, Walker describes going to Florida and searching through waist-high weeds to find what she thought was Hurston's grave and laying on it a marker inscribed "Zora Neale Hurston/`A Genius of the South'/Novelist/ Folldorist/Anthropologist/1901-1960.

….two slate-colored gravestones settled at a slant into the lower corner of the field beside the lane. She could not read the names engraved on them, but she knew what they were. Joseph Watson, 1820-1891, and James Watson, son of Joseph and Hannah Watson, 1844-1863. The grave of Hannah Watson lay beside her husband’s and because she had died last, she had no marker, unless the pine tree growing there might count as one. To-morrow two men would drive up and leave a basket of flowers and a flag for Joseph because he had fought in the Civil War, and for James because he had died on his way home from it, but they would not have anything for Hannah because she had only identified her son James one hot summer day on the platform of North Derwich Station, and raised all the food her husband ate for twenty years as he sat in a chair in her kitchen, and done washings for Mrs. Hale to buy monuments for them at the end. But the flowers would die in the boxes; even if Jen found time to go down and set out the pansy plants in the ground, stray cows were sure to eat them off before the summer was over; and the Forrest children would take the flags to play with. Nothing would interfere with the tree.

The marker slants, flowerless, day’s almost done, I stand above my father’s grave with rage, often, often before I’ve made this awful pilgrimage to one who cannot visit me, who tore his page out: I come back for more, I spit upon this dreadful banker’s grave who shot his heart out in a Florida dawn O ho alas alas When will indifference come, I moan & rave I’d like to scrabble till I got right down away down under the grass and ax the casket open ha to see just how he’s taking it, which he sought so hard we’ll tear apart the mouldering grave clothes ha then Henry will heft the ax once more, his final card, and fell it on the start.

Reading in an essay by a white folklorist that Hurston was buried in an unmarked grave, Walker decided that such a fate was an insult to Hurston and began her search for the grave to put a marker on it. In a personal essay, "In search of Zora Neale Hurston," written for Ms. magazine, Walker describes going to Florida and searching through waist-high weeds to find what she thought was Hurston's grave and laying on it a marker inscribed "Zora Neale Hurston/`A Genius of the South'/Novelist/ Folldorist/Anthropologist/1901-1960.

Falco tucked the drawing he’d been working on into the pocket of his cloak and leaned back against a tall grave marker topped with a cross. His dark brown hair curled around his face, making him look like an angel in a painting. Cass stood directly in front of him, acutely aware of the fact that they were almost eye to eye. And lip to lip, she realized, tilting her body slightly backward at the thought. “What if,” Falco continued slowly, as though he were only just piecing together the idea, “you and I do a bit of investigating on our own?” His eyes lit up as he spoke. Cass took a step back. She felt her breathing slow and her head clear a little. Even the mist seemed to thin. “The two of us? Together?” Cass tucked an unruly strand of hair back into her bun. Falco reached up and yanked the tortoiseshell clip out of her hair, letting the tangled waves fall around her face. “Could be fun, don’t you think?” A hot flame coursed through Cass’s blood. She looked away from Falco, hurriedly retwisting her hair up on top of her head. She turned back just in time to see his sketch fall from his pocket and, picked up by the wind, go tumbling end over end across the grass. “Your drawing!” Her lantern fell to the ground, the candle flame blowing out as she ran after the flying parchment and tackled it. “So fierce,” Falco murmured, holding out a hand to help Cass to her feet. “I’m beginning to enjoy picking you up off the ground.

Before we left the chapel, I caught up with my grandfather to make one final plea. “Grandpa,” I said, “we can’t bury Dad’s ashes.” “That’s not your decision to make.” He started to walk away, but I grabbed his sleeve, knowing it would be my last chance. “Wasn’t it his?” I asked. “He wanted to be cremated because he didn’t want to be buried. Please, let us take his ashes out to Montauk.” As soon as the words came out of my mouth, I realized that I’d made a critical mistake. My grandfather realized it, too. He associated Montauk with my father’s frivolous hobbies, such as boating and fishing, activities that had distracted him from the serious business of real estate. “Montauk,” he repeated, almost smiling. “That’s not going to happen. Get in the car.” Sunlight glinted off the marble and granite grave markers as our grandfather, his light blue eyes squinting beneath his enormous eyebrows at the brightness of the day, explained that the tombstone, which was already inscribed with his mother’s and father’s names, would be removed temporarily so my father’s name and dates could be added. As he spoke, he spread his hands wide, like a used-car salesman, bouncing on the balls of his feet, almost jaunty, knowing he was in the presence of a rube. My grandfather followed the letter of the law and then did what he wanted. After my father was cremated, they put his ashes into a metal box and buried them in the ground.

A test for thyroid peroxidase antibodies (TPO Ab) is most important, as Hashimoto’s most commonly occurs when the immune system attacks TPO, an enzyme in the thyroid responsible for of thyroid hormone production.22 23 Sometimes a thyroglobulin antibodies (TGB Ab) test is necessary, since Hashimoto’s can follow a TGB attack.24 TGB is produced in the thyroid and is used by the gland to produce thyroid hormones. A test for thyroid stimulating hormone antibodies (TSH Ab) can identify Grave s’ disease (hyperthyroidism), although TSH Ab can also be elevated in Hashimoto’s. On lab tests, the TSH marker is commonly referred to as thyroid stimulating immunoglobulin (TSI). In severe autoimmune thyroid diseases, antibodies to T4 and T3 can develop.

The moment the first missile crashed into the Skylark, Captain Jeane Blake realized she had gravely underestimated the danger they’d gotten themselves into. The spaceship jolted, and a series of yellow warning messages flashed up on the screens. On the radar display, the markers showing the Lark and the Union vessel hot on its trail flickered in and out of existence in the interference, and the gravitational anomalies of the lane kept throwing both ships off-course. Their pursuer was gaining on them.

His boots scuffed on the steps. Here, Bryce had once knelt. Right here, she’d traded her resting place for Danika’s. He squeezed her hand tighter. Bryce squeezed back, leaning into him as they stepped under the archway. Dry ground lay beyond. Mist, and grayness, and silence. Marble and granite obelisks rose like thick spears, many inscribed—but not with names. Just with strange symbols. Grave markers, or something else? Hunt scanned the gloom, ears straining for any hint of Reapers, of the ruler they sought.

Paul’s grave had a tiny marker that looked more like a stake you’d use to label a vegetable garden. SUGAR SNAP PEAS. CABBAGE. SADISTIC PRICK.

Graceland is, in many ways, Chicago’s memory. The graves there mark the resting places of titans of industry, holy men, gangsters, politicians, near saints, and madmen and murderers. Tales of tragedy, of vast hubris, of bitter greed and steadfast love, are represented in the markers that stand over the graves of thousands.

This is the part no one talks about anymore. Not in civilized company at least. When a war is over, you stop discussing the cost. The reality. The blood-soaked soil or the grave markers or the collateral damage. The ways we kill our enemies in order to claim victory. History is written by the men who live. Not the ones who die. But I’ve heard these stories myself. I know it isn’t so easy as the French were bad and the English were good. Ha! The English? No. You’ll never hear me defend their methods. My people came from those shores because they had no options left.

Showmen's Rest was truly something to behold. Throughout the entire yard, statues and carvings of elephants, clowns, and tight-rope walkers danced on the gray and white surfaces of tombstones and grave-markers. For the first time, Michael got the feeling that the men and women who'd been buried there were probably really happy with their final resting place. It was a touching tribute, one that honored their passion in life and that had been constructed out of love and respect.

The family took all the seeds from the garden and then they buried Nokomis there, deeply, wrapped in her blanket with gifts and tobacco for the spirit world. They buried her simply. There was no stone, no grave house, nothing to mark where she lay except the exuberant and drying growth of her garden. Nokomis had said: I do not need a marker of my passage, for my creator knows where I am. I do not want anyone to cry. I lived a good life, my hair turned to snow, I saw my great grandchildren, I grew my garden. That is all.

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.

There is no grave, no marker for any of them, yet they live in the memory of those who loved them. Selma left her poems, the spark of her vital personality, the fullness of her lively mind and the memory of Leiser, whom she adored. In the poem The Storm (March, 1941) Selma dwelled on the gentleness, the fragility of a rosebud and the expectation to see it open and bloom and about the precariousness of all life. The verse is her own epitaph: If now a frost comes - it dies, dies and has never lived its life.

Greetings. There is a body buried on your property, covered in your blood. The unfortunate young lady’s name is Rita Jones. You’ve seen this missing school-teacher’s face on the news, I’m sure. In her jeans pocket you’ll find a slip of paper with a phone number on it. You have one day to call that number. If I have not heard from you by 8:00 P.M. tomorrow (5/17), the Charlotte Police Department will receive an anonymous phone call. I’ll tell them where Rita Jones is buried on Andrew Thomas’s lakefront property, how he killed her, and where the murder weapon can be found in his house. (I do believe a paring knife is missing from your kitchen.) I hope for your sake I don’t have to make that call. I’ve placed a property marker on the grave site. Just walk along the shoreline toward the southern boundary of your property and you’ll find it. I strongly advise against going to the police, as I am always watching you.

The little stone marker is probably so cloaked in moss now, after decades of exposure to the wind and rain, that no one can tell whose grave it is anymore.

Opening the box, they withdrew the thick plastic grave markers. His lips twitched as he scanned the epitaphs: R.I.P. Van Winkle, Dee Cayed, I.M. Gone, and Barry R. Bones. "Dracula, Fangs for the Memories," he read aloud and, chuckled. Grace held up her favorite. "Rigger Mortys. Death Grips and Holds Me Tight, But I Shall Return on Halloween Night." Tongue-in-cheek, he asked her, "What would your headstone say?" "She Threw a Great Party," came to mind. "How about yours?" "Death by Decorating.

BEN HUR by Lew Wallace… Wallace's grave marker at the cemetery in Crawfordsville includes a line from the Balthasar character in Ben-Hur: "I would not give one hour of life as a soul for a thousand years of life as a man.

Nesta pursed her lips. “I know the type.” Her mother’s mother had been the same way before she’d died of a deep-rooted cough that had turned into a deadly infection. Nesta had been seven when the stern-faced dame who had insisted on being called Grandmamma had beaten her palms raw with a ruler for missteps in her dancing lessons. Worthless, clumsy girl. You’re a waste of my time. Maybe this will help you remember to pay attention to my orders. Nesta had only felt relief when the old beast had died. Elain, who’d been spared the cruelties of Grandmamma’s tutelage, had wept and dutifully laid flowers at her grave—one soon joined by their mother’s stone marker. Feyre had been too young to understand, but Nesta had never bothered to lay flowers for her grandmamma. Not when Nesta bore a scar near her left thumb from one of the woman’s nastier punishments. Nesta had only left flowers for her mother, whose grave she had visited more often than she cared to admit. She hadn’t once visited her father’s grave outside Velaris.

A neglected grave struck her as an achingly sad sight; it was like saying the person inside the grave had been forgotten too. Many of the markers were so old that any close relatives were long gone. But as long as Keira was there, they didn’t have to remain forgotten.

A woman born to teaching wakes in the morning desperate to be near her pupils. I was that way. I am that way. I have told my own children and my husband to put on my grave marker 'Mother' and 'Teacher.' That before all else, even my own name. And if the chiseler has room, to have him put 'Wife.' 'Wife' below my name. 'Dutiful Wife,' if he can manage it.

Duffy blinked, impressed by the old man’s speech. “And that’s why the Herzwesten is one of the most important centers, eh?” “Possibly the most important.” Aurelianus peered at the Irishman, as if gauging how much revelation he could take at one sitting. “Being Irish,” he said slowly, “you’ve doubtless heard of Finn Mac Cool.” Duffy nodded. “There actually was such a man,” Aurelianus said. “He was the High King of these people I was speaking of, the nomadic beaker people—call them Celts if you like, it’s not entirely inaccurate—and he died here.” He pointed at the floor. Duffy automatically peeked under the table. “Here?” “He’s actually buried under this building,” Aurelianus told him. “You mentioned the old Roman fort that used to stand here; it was built around this brewing cellar, which had been producing beer for two thousand years when the first Roman saw the place. The brewery was built thirty-five centuries ago, to be a marker over Finn’s grave.

In your care I will be released from my worries” (CIL 11.137). In a few brief sentences, this man’s colorful life, during which he passed from freedom to slavery to freedom and ultimately to prosperity, is memorialized. An aspect of life that these tombstones bring to light is the strong emotions that tied together spouses, family members, and friends. One grave marker records a husband’s grief for his young wife: “To the eternal memory of Blandina Martiola, a most blameless girl, who lived eighteen years, nine months, five days. Pompeius Catussa, a Sequanian citizen and a plasterer, dedicates this monument to his wife, who was incomparable and very kind to him. She lived with him five years, six months, eighteen days without any shadow of a fault. You who read this, go bathe in the baths of Apollo as I used to do with my wife. I wish I still could” (CIL 1.1983). The affection that some parents felt for their children is also reflected in these inscriptions: “Spirits who live in the underworld, lead innocent Magnilla through the groves and the Elysian Fields directly to your places of rest. She was snatched away in her eighth year by cruel fate while she was still enjoying the tender time of childhood. She was beautiful and sensitive, clever, elegant, sweet, and charming beyond her years. This poor child who was deprived of her life so quickly must be mourned with perpetual lament and tears” (CIL 6.21846). Some Romans seemed more concerned with ensuring that their bodies would lie undisturbed after death than with recording their accomplishments while alive. An inscription of this type states: “Gaius Tullius Hesper had this tomb built for himself, as a place where his bones might be laid. If anyone damages them or removes them from here, may he live in great physical pain for a long time, and when he dies, may the gods of the underworld deny entrance to his spirit” (CIL 6.36467). Some tombstones offer comments that perhaps preserve something of their authors’ temperaments. One terse inscription observes: “I was not. I was. I am not. I care not” (CIL 5.2893). Finally, a man who clearly enjoyed life left a tombstone that included the statement: “Baths, wine, and sex ruin our bodies. But what makes life worth living except baths, wine, and sex?” (CIL 6.15258). Perhaps one of the greatest values of these tombstones is the manner in which they record the actual feelings of individuals, and demonstrate the universality across time, cultures, and geography of basic emotions such as love, hate, jealousy, and pride. They also preserve one of the most complicated yet subtle characteristics of human beings—our enjoyment of humor. Many of the messages were plainly drafted to amuse and entertain the reader, and the fact that some of them can still do so after 2,000 years is one of the best testimonials to the humanity shared by the people of the ancient and the modern worlds.

I put one of my headphones back in, watch the road drift by, and try not to think about how Eric couldn’t hear me at the water park, and how my secret is still safe, and how Eric looked cute without a shirt on, and how I wish I didn’t even think that. It had been a mistake to think to tell him. I push the truth down. Bury it. Stick a grave marker on top. What’s one more year of life as a boy?

Captain Miller lay close by where he had been hit, his back slumped against the bridge’s wall. Ryan, in anguish, was alone with his rescuer in the final moments before Miller died. Ryan watched as the captain struggled in his last moments, shot clean through one lung. The captain wouldn’t take another breath, except to grunt, “James. Earn this … earn it.” Were these dying words a final order or charge? Private Ryan has always taken it that way. These memories rivet the aged James Ryan, who now finds himself staring at the grave marker and mumbling to his dead commander. He tells Captain Miller that his family is with him. He confesses that he wasn’t sure how he would feel about coming to the cemetery today. He wants Captain Miller to know that every day of his life he’s thought of their conversation at the bridge, of Miller’s dying words. Ryan has tried to live a good life, and he hopes he has. At least in the captain’s eyes, he hopes he’s “earned it,” that his life has been worthy of the sacrifice Captain Miller and the other men made of giving their lives for his. As Ryan mutters these thoughts, he cannot help wondering how any life, however well lived, could be worthy of his friends’ sacrifice. The old man stands up, but he doesn’t feel released. The question remains unanswered. His wife comes to his side again. He looks at her and pleads, “Tell me I’ve led a good life.” Confused by his request, she responds with a question: “What?” He has to know the answer. He tries to articulate it again: “Tell me I’m a good man.” The request flusters her, but his earnestness makes her think better of putting it off. With great dignity, she says, “You are.