Visiting Cemetery Quotes

Destiny is usually just around the corner. Like a thief, a hooker, or a lottery vendor: its three most common personifications. But what destiny does not do is home visits. You have to go for it.

Destiny doesn't do home visits... you have to go for it yourself.

When the weather's nice, my parents go out quite frequently and stick a bunch of flowers on old Allie's grave. I went with them a couple of times, but I cut it out. In the first place, I don't enjoy seeing him in that crazy cemetery. Surrounded by dead guys and tombstones and all. It wasn't too bad when the sun was out, but twice—twice—we were there when it started to rain. It was awful. It rained on his lousy tombstone, and it rained on the grass on his stomach. It rained all over the place. All the visitors that were visiting the cemetery started running like hell over to their cars. That's what nearly drove me crazy. All the visitors could get in their cars and turn on their radios and all and then go someplace nice for dinner—everybody except Allie. I couldn't stand it. I know it's only his body and all that's in the cemetery, and his soul's in Heaven and all that crap, but I couldn't stand it anyway. I just wished he wasn't there.

I guess I'm the perfect match, then, for a girl who likes to visit a cemetery." He drew out every syllable so that it sounded like a love song. I closed my eyes, savoring those words. "A perfect match," I murmured. "My other half.

Even though I buried our love in a coffin, it isn’t dead. No, our love is very much alive. Or at least it was yesterday, when I went to visit the cemetery.

This is the last time I would ever visit the cemetery or my wife's grave, but I didn't want to expend too much effort in trying to remember it. As I said, this is the place where she's never been anything but dead. There's not much value in remembering that.

It felt like a cemetery, but I didn’t see myself returning to visit any time soon.

What could you possibly hope to find in a cemetary?" The women said. "The dead tell no secrets and the living seldom come to visit them.

I visited my old haunt, but somehow without all my old friends there with me, the cemetery just wasn’t the same.

He had neither companions nor friends, church nor creed. He lived his spiritual life without any communion with others, visiting his relatives at Christmas and escorting them to the cemetery when they died. He performed these two social duties for old dignity's sake but conceded nothing further to the conventions which regulate the civic life.

When I visit the cemetery, I walk past hundreds, possibly thousands of stories now silenced. And I know that history ‘recorded’ holds the adventures that history ‘lost’ let's slip through its fingers. And I’ve thought that I need to live a life worthy of being ‘recorded’ so that the adventure that might help another never slips through the fingers of anything.

I hate that I’ve become one of those old men who visits a cemetery to be with his dead wife. When I was (much) younger I used to ask Kathy what the point would be. A pile of rotting meat and bones that used to be a person isn’t a person anymore; it’s just a pile of rotting meat and bones. The person is gone—off to heaven or hell or wherever or nowhere. You might as well visit a side of beef. When you get older you realize this is still the case. You just don’t care. It’s what you have.

If you want to know how fortunate you are, visit three places: the slum, the hospital, and the cemetery.

WARNING Lock your car and protect your valuables while visiting cemetery

He lived his spiritual life without any communion with others, visiting his relatives at Christmas and escorting them to the cemetery when they died. He performed these two social duties for old dignity's sake but conceded nothing further to the conventions which regulate the civic life.

Destiny is usually just around the corner. Like a thief, a hooker, or a lottery vendor: its three most common personifications. But what destiny does not do is home visits. You have to go for it.

Franz shook his head. "When a society is rich, its people don't need to work with their hands;they can devote themselves to activities of the spirit. We have more and more universities and more and more students. If students are going to earn degrees, they've got to come up with dissertation topics. And since dissertations can be written about everything under the sun, the number of topics is infinite. Sheets of paper covered with words pile up in archives sadder than cemeteries, because no one ever visits them, not even on All Souls' Day. Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity. That's why one banned book in your former country means infinitely more than the billions of words spewed out by our universities.

The book thief lay in bed that night, and the boy only came before she closed her eyes. He was one member of a cast, for Liesel was always visited in that room. Her papa stood and called her half a woman. Max was writing The Word Shaker in the corner. Rudy was naked by the door. Occasionally her mother stood on a bedside train platform. And far away, in the room that stretched like a bridge to a nameless town, her brother, Werner, played in the cemetery snow.

(Ahem, this is your cue to visit the Web sites for PS Publishing, Cemetery Dance Publications, and Subterranean Press

If he didn’t watch his diet, quit smoking and take exercise, he would soon be back in the cemetery for a more permanent visit.

Do not cling to the shore, but set sail for exotic lands and places no longer found on maps. Walk on hallowed grounds. Blaze new trails. The term synchronicity was coined in the 1950s by the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, to describe uncanny coincidences that seem to be meaningful. The Greek roots are syn-, "together," and khronos, "time." Synchronicity is the effector of Gnosis. Explore the Bogomils and the Cathars not just through books but, if at all possible, by visiting their lands, cemeteries and descendants. Finally, explore the most contemporary manifestations of Gnosticism: the writings of C.G. Jung, Jorge Luis Borges, Aleister Crowley, René Guénon, Hermann Hesse, Philip K. Dick, and Albert Camus. Gradually, you will begin to understand the various thought currents and systems existing in Gnosticism, and you will have begun to understand what does and does not appeal to you in Gnostic thought.

Destiny is usually around the corner. Like a thief, like a hooker, or a lottery vendor: its three most common personifications. But what destiny does not do is home visits. You have to go for it

look at the painting again. Despite the obvious differences, this girl is deeply, achingly familiar. In her I see myself at twelve years old, on a rare afternoon away from my chores. In my twenties, seeking refuge from a broken heart. Only a few days ago, visiting my parents’ graves in the family cemetery, halfway between the dory in the haymow and the wheelchair in the sea. From the recesses of my brain a word floats up: synecdoche. A part that stands in for the whole. Christina’s World. The

If any man approaches my wife, take care of him,” I growl and lower my visor. Time to pay a visit to the snitch. “Take care of him?” Jovan asks. “In what way?” I meet his gaze through the tinted shield. “In any way that ends with requiring a spot at a cemetery, Jovan.

We need to reform our funeral industry, introducing new practices that aren't so profit-oriented, and that do more to include the family. But we cannot begin to reform—or even question!-our death systems when we act like little Jean de Brébeufs, falsely convinced we have it right while all these "other people" are disrespectful and barbarous. This dismissive attitude can be found in places you'd never expect. Lonely Planet, the largest guidebook publisher in the world, included the idyllic Trunyan cemetery in their book on visiting Bali. In Trunyan, the villagers weave bamboo cages for their dead to decompose in, and then stack the skulls and bones out in the lush green landscape. Lonely Planet, instead of explaining the meaning behind these ancient customs, advised wise travelers to "skip the ghoulish spectacle.

It rained on his lousy tombstone, and it rained on the grass on his stomach. It rained all over the place. All the visitors that were visiting the cemetery started running like hell over to their cars. That's what nearly drove me crazy. All the visitors could get in their cars and turn on their radios and all and then go someplace nice for dinner- everybody except Allie. I couldn't stand it. I know it's only his body and all that's in the cemetery, and his soul's in Heaven and all that crap, but I couldn't stand it anyway. I just wish he wasn't there. You didn't know him. If you'd known him, you'd know what I mean. It's not too bad when the sun's out, but the sun only comes out when it feels like coming out.

Don't laugh, it's people like her who make this lousy world a place worth visiting.' 'Whores?' 'No. We're all whores, sooner or later. I mean good-hearted people. And don't look at me like that. Weddings turn me to jelly.' We remained there embracing that special silence, gazing at the reflections on the water. After a while dawn tinged the sky with amber, and Barcelona woke up. We heard the distant bells from the basilica of Santa Maria del Mar, just emerging from the mist on the other side of the harbour. 'Do you think Carax is still there, somewhere in the city?' I asked. 'Ask me another question.' 'Do you have the rings?' Fermin smiled. 'Come on, let's go. They're waiting for us, Daniel. Life is waiting for us.

Immediately across the road is a ruined abbey and cemetery. As I haven't visited one since late yesterday afternoon, I decide to take a look. On the whole, it's fair to say that, if you're travelling round the west of Ireland, an interest in ruined abbeys, however slight, will stand you in better stead than a passion for rollerblading, say or a penchant for showbiz gossip.

The suffering of the world, the mystery of the universe, the impulse towards the sublime in love and heroism, the grief and despair over a dreamt of but unattainable beatitude, the hamlet-like visits to cemeteries, the romantic parlour, romantic beards, and romantic haircuts-all these and similar things gave evidence of restive spirits. It was expected and feared that they would join conspiratorial sects and rise with arms in their hand the moment they had the chance.

Growing up in Burbank, there wasn’t much of a museum culture. I never visited one until I was a teenager (unless you count the Hollywood Wax Museum). I occupied my time going to see monster movies, watching tv, drawing, and playing in the local cemetery. Later, when I did start frequenting museums, I was struck by home similar the vibe was to the cemetery. Not in a morbid way, but both have a quiet, introspective, yet electrifying atmosphere. Excitement, mystery, discovery, life, and death all in one place.

Bea had always detested visiting the city of the dead, where all she saw was a morbid staging of death and a poor attempt at convincing terrified visitors that ancestry and good names persevere even in the hereafter. She deplored the idea that an army of architects, sculptors, and artisans had sold their talents to construct such a sumptuous necropolis and populate it with statues in which the spirits of death leaned over to kiss the foreheads of children born before the days of penicillin, where ghostly damsels were trapped in spells of eternal melancholy, and where inconsolable angels, stretching out over marble tombstones, wept the loss of some rich colonial butcher who had earned both fortune and glory through the slave trade and the bloodstained sugar of the Caribbean islands.

The fact is that what scientists call zoonotic disease was little known in the Americas. By contrast, swine, mainstays of European agriculture, transmit anthrax, brucellosis, leptospirosis, trichinosis, and tuberculosis. Pigs breed exuberantly and can pass diseases to deer and turkeys, which then can infect people. Only a few of De Soto’s pigs would have had to wander off to contaminate the forest. The calamity wreaked by the De Soto expedition, Ramenofsky and Galloway argued, extended across the whole Southeast. The societies of the Caddo, on the Texas-Arkansas border, and the Coosa, in western Georgia, both disintegrated soon after. The Caddo had a taste for monumental architecture: public plazas, ceremonial platforms, mausoleums. After De Soto’s army left the Caddo stopped erecting community centers and began digging community cemeteries. Between the visits of De Soto and La Salle, according to Timothy K. Perttula, an archaeological consultant in Austin, Texas, the Caddoan population fell from about 200,000 to about 8,500—a drop of nearly 96 percent. In the eighteenth century, the tally shrank further, to 1,400. An equivalent loss today would reduce the population of New York City to 56,000, not enough to fill Yankee Stadium. “That’s one reason whites think of Indians as nomadic hunters,” Russell Thornton, an anthropologist at the University of California at Los Angeles, said to me. “Everything else—all the heavily populated urbanized societies—was wiped out.

THE THING THAT ENTRANCED ME about Chicago in the Gilded Age was the city’s willingness to take on the impossible in the name of civic honor, a concept so removed from the modern psyche that two wise readers of early drafts of this book wondered why Chicago was so avid to win the world’s fair in the first place. The juxtaposition of pride and unfathomed evil struck me as offering powerful insights into the nature of men and their ambitions. The more I read about the fair, the more entranced I became. That George Ferris would attempt to build something so big and novel—and that he would succeed on his first try—seems, in this day of liability lawsuits, almost beyond comprehension. A rich seam of information exists about the fair and about Daniel Burnham in the beautifully run archives of the Chicago Historical Society and the Ryerson and Burnham libraries of the Art Institute of Chicago. I acquired a nice base of information from the University of Washington’s Suzallo Library, one of the finest and most efficient libraries I have encountered. I also visited the Library of Congress in Washington, where I spent a good many happy hours immersed in the papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, though my happiness was at times strained by trying to decipher Olmsted’s execrable handwriting. I read—and mined—dozens of books about Burnham, Chicago, the exposition, and the late Victorian era. Several proved consistently valuable: Thomas Hines’s Burnham of Chicago (1974); Laura Wood Roper’s FLO: A Biography of Frederick Law Olmsted (1973); and Witold Rybczynski’s A Clearing in the Distance (1999). One book in particular, City of the Century by Donald L. Miller (1996), became an invaluable companion in my journey through old Chicago. I found four guidebooks to be especially useful: Alice Sinkevitch’s AIA Guide to Chicago (1993); Matt Hucke and Ursula Bielski’s Graveyards of Chicago (1999); John Flinn’s Official Guide to the World’s Columbian Exposition (1893); and Rand, McNally & Co.’ s Handbook to the World’s Columbian Exposition (1893). Hucke and Bielski’s guide led me to pay a visit to Graceland Cemetery, an utterly charming haven where, paradoxically, history comes alive.

true—helping a hurting person is a bit scary. We want to do the right thing, not the wrong thing—say what will help, not what will hurt. To add to our confusion, our friend is “not quite herself.” She’s different. We want our friend fixed and back to normal. All you have to do is care. Harold Ivan Smith described the process so well: Grief sharers always look for an opportunity to actively care. You can never “fix” an individual’s grief, but you can wash the sink full of dishes, listen to him or her talk, take his or her kids to the park. You can never “fix” an individual’s grief but you can visit the cemetery with him or her. Grief sharing is not about fixing—it’s about showing up. Coming alongside. Being interruptible. “Hanging out” with the bereaving. In the words of World War II veterans, “present and reporting for duty.” The grief path is not a brief path. It’s a marathon, not a sprint.[1] What can you expect from a friend who is hurting? Actually, not very much. And the more her experience moves beyond a loss and closer to a crisis or trauma, the more this is true. Sometimes you’ll see a friend experiencing a case of the “crazies.” Her response seems irrational. She’s not herself. Her behavior is different from or even abnormal compared to the person not going through a major loss. Just remember, she’s reacting to an out-of-the-ordinary event. What she experienced is abnormal, so her response is actually quite normal. If what the person has experienced is traumatic she may even seem to exhibit some of the symptoms of ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder). And because your friend is this way, she is not to be avoided. Others are needed at this time in her life. These are responses you can expect. Your friend is no longer functioning as she once did—and probably won’t for a while. You Are Needed You are needed when a person experiences a sudden intrusion or disruption in her life. If you (or another friend) aren’t available, the only person she has to talk with for guidance, support, and direction is herself. And who wants support from someone struggling with a case of the “crazies”? But a problem may arise when your friend doesn’t realize that she needs you, at least at that particular time. Your sensitivity is needed at this point. Remember, when your friend is hurting and facing a loss, you are dealing with a loss as well, because the relationship you had with your friend has changed. It’s not the same.

According to cemetery industry statistics, the average grave receives just two visits in its lifetime—total,

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.

Together, they were legend tripping, the age old practice of visiting strange locations of urban myths. Places such as the Baird chair monument, the Screaming Beaches, or the Spider Gates Cemetery. Popular sites frequently visited by tour groups or rowdy teenagers, locations with a history of the tragic, the horrific, or just plain old supernatural acclaim

he realized that this visit, all his visits, were really trips to a cemetery, paying respects at the grave, the way they had visited his father’s, flowers in hand, his mother solemn, Leon bored and uncomfortable, not knowing, as he did now, that she wasn’t visiting his father but some younger part of herself, what she used to be.

In the end, after advice from the Foreign Office, she decided make a three-day visit to Bosnia, still slowly recovering from civil war, in the company of the distinguished journalist Lord Deedes. He recalled not only her gentle sense of humour but her ability to listen and to communicate the uncommunicable. When she walked around Sarajevo’s largest cemetery she encountered a mother tending her son’s grave. ‘There was no language barrier,’ he wrote. ‘The two women gently embraced. Watched this scene from a distance, I sought in my mind who else could have done this. Nobody.

This is Storm, and there’s nothing mysterious at all about me riding him at night, even if the good folk of Tarrytown have taken to making up tales about me and my nightly rides.” He patted Storm again. “Storm, if you must know, hasn’t tolerated sunlight well for the past couple of years. His eyes have turned sensitive to the light, but I didn’t want him to grow old before his time, which is why we ride when it’s dark.” A rather warm and mushy feeling began traveling through Lucetta, a feeling that had her knees going a tad weak, until she remembered she was talking to a man who’d yet to explain why he’d been wearing an eye patch when she’d first met him, or why questionable jewelry and a bloody sword had been stashed in his fireplace. Add in the fact that there was now a suit of armor meandering around, scaring unsuspecting guests in the middle of the night, and she had no business allowing her knees to go all wobbly. “. . . and since you have managed to track me down, would you care to join us as we continue on with our nightly adventure?” “Adventure . . . ? What kind of adventure?” she asked slowly. Bram leaned down and placed his mouth directly next to her ear, his closeness sending a chill, and one she didn’t think was from the cold air, down her spine. “We’ll just have to make that up as we go.” A thread of disappointment stole over her as he straightened, moved to Storm’s side, and then swung up into the saddle. “What type of adventure sounds fun to you?” he asked. “I’m not certain what you’re asking.” He gave a sad shake of his head. “Oh dear, you’ve forgotten how to have fun, haven’t you.” Annoyance was swift. “Of course I haven’t.” “Prove it.” Not one to back down from a challenge, Lucetta smiled. “Very well, off the top of my head, I believe it would be great fun to visit Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, and . . . walk amongst the gravestones.” Smiling, Bram sent her an approving sort of nod. “Very good, Miss Plum, you’re obviously a lady after my own heart, although I will admit I didn’t take you for the type who’d enjoy places that embrace a rather gothic nature.” “Or morbid, one might say,” she added. Nodding

One rainy summer's day in 2007, I had the opportunity to visit a village on the bank of a river where Van Gogh spent his final days. Walking through a field of wheat, I came to a quiet village cemetery. The artist shot himself in the chest at the age of 37. He had sold only one painting while he was alive. Next to him lies his brother Theo, who died just six months after him. After leaving Van Gogh's very tiny room on the second story of the Auberge Ravoux, I walked on and on, down the country road. The rain stopped and the sunflowers swayed in the breeze.

Tomb of the Unknown Soldier After visiting the grave of a brother at Arlington National Cemetery inD.C., the mourner had a little extra time and decided to visit the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. He was shocked to see a huge brass plate inscribed with the words: 'Here lies ᏰέƦẙḽԃṏሁ Լέῳ, Poet and Soldier' The man asked the Marine guard at the tomb, "I don't get it. How can this be the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier with somebody's nameinscribed on it?" The guard said, "As a soldier, it's true, he was unknown, and that's why he's buried here. But as a writer he was the most popular and hated poet on Hello Poetry. I heard he was even more popular than Jesus. He performed a modern day miracle proving it to his doubters. Also, I've just got word he's trending at this cemetery right now.

After De Soto’s army left the Caddo stopped erecting community centers and began digging community cemeteries. Between the visits of De Soto and La Salle, according to Timothy K. Perttula, an archaeological consultant in Austin, Texas, the Caddoan population fell from about 200,000 to about 8,500—a drop of nearly 96 percent. In the eighteenth century, the tally shrank further, to 1,400. An equivalent loss today would reduce the population of New York City to 56,000, not enough to fill Yankee Stadium

This magnificent city that I only knew from photographs had been devastated. The infamous submarine bunkers had been bombed, and the bunkers that survived were later dynamited. I could understand this, but why civilian houses had also been leveled and set afire by incendiary bombs was beyond me. Each British Lancaster bomber delivered up to 8,000 pounds of bomb loads each night, with as many as 1,000 bombers over the target on a given night. During these raids, this great port city was set alight like a Roman candle! American B-17 and B 24 bombers also came during the daytime. Operation Gomorrah was conducted day and night causing a howling noise as the Feuersturm firestorm sucked the air out of the city to feed itself. With surface temperatures reaching 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit, asphalt streets actually melted, leaving people trapped in the black molten gunk. Winds of 150 miles per hour fanned flames that reached an altitude of over 15,000 feet! I lost an aunt, who was a beautiful young woman in her twenties, along with her husband and baby. Her older sister also perished in the flames. They all now lie buried in a mass gravesite, which I visited in the Ohlsdorf Cemetery. The stories I heard from people who could still talk about them, without totally choking up, were unbelievable. It was said that over 50 miles of street frontage were set ablaze and totally reduced to ashes during the raids, and another 133 miles were severely damaged. An estimated 1,500 people were killed on the first night of the raids and many more were wounded. Those who survived were suddenly homeless and without possessions. The total casualties were estimated at approximately 45,000 people. At the end of it, Hitler refused to come to the city and sent Hermann Göring instead! This was never forgotten or forgiven by das volk, the people. What is it with us? Why do we as human beings have to experience war after war? It seems that we never learn and so perhaps we will have to witness even worse in the future.

Terror was always just behind her shoulder: she was wasted by the effort of not turning round. She dressed up her fear, so that she could look at it—in the form of fever, rats, unemployment. The real thing was taboo—death coming nearer every year in the strange place: everybody packing up and leaving, while she stayed in a cemetery no one visited, in a big aboveground tomb.

Why You Should Visit Cemeteries Survivorship Bias

That destiny doesn’t do home visits, that you have to go for it yourself?

Destiny is usually just around the corner. Like a thief, a hooker, or a lottery vendor: its three most common personifications. But what destiny does not do is home visits. You have to go for it yourself.

Destiney is usually just around the corner. Like a thief, a hooker, or a lottery vendor: its three most common personifications. But what destiny does not do is home visits. You have to go for it.

When a society is rich, its people don't need to work with their hands; they can devote themselves to activities of the spirit. We have more and more universities and more and more students. If students are going to earn degrees, they've got to come up with dissertation topics. And since dissertations can be written about everything under the sun, the number of topics is infinite. Sheets of paper covered with words pile up in archives sadder than cemeteries, because no one ever visits them, not even on All Souls' Day. Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity.

That’s why it’s so important to pay our respects to deceased friends and relatives at the cemetery. Sometimes you hear people say that they don’t think that’s necessary because the person’s “not really there,” that he or she is “with God,” or that the best thing to do is “say a prayer” for the person’s soul. The problem with this kind of thinking is that it’s only half true. As we’ve said, after someone dies, only part of the person is with God. The other part—the person’s body—is still here with us on Earth. When we visit someone at the cemetery, we are showing that we understand and believe this truth: that the person we loved is not just a spirit, that he or she is going to be a whole person once again. Justin Martyr, writing a little more than one hundred years after Christ’s own bodily resurrection, summed it up perfectly: “If God has called humans to life and resurrection, he has called not a part, but a whole—and that is the soul and the body.

The ultimate symbol of our religious devotion isn’t our churches, though it’s often beside them. In the South, we understand cemeteries as our final reward, and as Grits, we understand the importance of keeping them in shape. We visit the graves of our ancestors often, especially on a Sunday, and pray for their souls. We picnic in Confederate cemeteries, with their weather-worn memorials, and remember the sacrifices and sins of our past. Cemeteries are sacred ground in the South. They are the place where faith, family, history, and community meet. We can’t think of a better definition of the true power of Southern religion.

To this day, I can still recall seeing our flag with Mt. Suribachi in the background. When I hear our national anthem, I always think about the flag over the cemetery on Iwo Jima. The two things I remember most are the first five minutes on the beach with hundreds of dead Marines and visiting the cemetery where Captain Steve and the other dead from the 3rd Battalion were buried.

When a society is rich people don't need to work with their hands; they can devote themselves to activities of spirit. We have more and more universities and more and more students. If students are going to earn degrees, they've got to come up with dissertation topics. And since dissertations can be written about everything under the sun, the number of topics is infinite. Sheets of paper pile up in archives sadder than cemeteries, because no one ever visits them, not even on All Souls' Day. Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity. That's why one banned book in your former country means infinitely more than the billions of words spewed out by our universities.

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. I always imagine that they must rise at night and visit among themselves, the way they used to in the piazza. I did cry over Absalom, Absalom!

Is it possible, then, do you think, that when he returned to Barcelona, Carax may have felt tempted to visit your daughter, Nuria,

Monsieur Roquefort frequently visited a secondhand bookstall positioned outside Notre-Dame. It was there, by chance, one afternoon in 1929, that he came across a novel by an unknown author, someone called Julián Carax.

On one of his visits, he told me how, for a pittance, he’d just acquired the Spanish rights for the novels of Julián Carax, a young writer from Barcelona who lived in Paris. This must have been in 1928 or 1929.

Cimetière du Père-Lachaise is the most visited cemetery in the world,

I wouldn’t go to war with you people,” Trump said, according to the Rucker and Leonnig account, and later confirmed for me. “You’re a bunch of dopes and babies.” According to one person in the room: “You could have heard a pin drop. It was about the worst moment I had ever seen between a president and his military brass.” It would deteriorate from there, of course. For example, during a visit to France to commemorate the sacrifices of American soldiers in World War II, Trump balked at a cemetery visit. “Why should I go to that cemetery?” he asked. “It’s filled with losers.” Later on the same trip, Trump characterized the nearly two thousand marines who died in a World War I battle as “suckers” for getting killed.

My grandmother swaddled her baby, as they did two thousand years ago, and let him swing on a tree branch so she could do backbreaking work for fifteen cents a day. Lizzie talked about working, herself, too, starting when she was eight or nine years old, long before the era of child labor laws, at the Milford Shoe Company. “My first day, they put me at a sewing machine and give me two pieces a leathuh. They told me how to stitch the pieces togethuh—paht of a man’s shoe. Each time I did that, they told me, drop it inna drawa. I thought, this is easy. Zip, zip, zip, one afta anuthuh. End of the day comes, my drawa is full. Lady next to me, olda woman—she didn’t have so many done. The boss fired her right then. They gave me her job afta that.” From that day on, my aunt worked in factories all her life. Like my mother, she was heavy set but solid, as sturdy and muscled as the men who worked beside her, first at Milford Shoe and later at William Lapworth & Sons, a manufacturer of elastic fabrics, whose British-born owner berated her whenever a needle broke on her sewing machine. Later she worked at Archer Rubber, where a chemical spray left a small scar on her cheek. Her final employer was the Stylon Tile Company, known for making pink and black bathroom tiles, which were hard to handle without cutting her hands. She always called her place of work “the shop.” She was “working down at the shop.” Before I left her house, she always gave me something to take with me, like a bag of her hand-made swiss-chard ravioli, or if it was close to Christmas, a plate of her own Italian cookies. My favorites were the ceci, little fried cookies that looked like ravioli but were stuffed with sweet chestnut and honey filling, or the ones that looked like bowties, called cenci, dusted with powdered sugar. No matter how busy she was, she never let anyone leave her house hungry or empty-handed. Once I accompanied Lizzie to the Sacred Heart Cemetery to help her with all the flower baskets she wanted to lay on the gravestones of lost family members. There’s something about Italians and cemeteries. I was never attracted to cemeteries, never finding any comfort in visiting the dead, but for most of my family, it was like attending a family reunion. Seeing Lizzie moving

story of Private Stephen Kelly of Co. E, 91st Pennsylvania. He joined that unit in August 1861, and was mustered out three years later in Philadelphia. Several years after the war Kelly had occasion to visit the battlefield park and was surprised to find his own grave, (#A-88) nicely defined in the Pennsylvania section of the National Cemetery. It is there today, but Kelly was not in it. He took the whole matter in stride and in good humor, and was once heard to say: “[E]ach Decoration Day I go up there and strew some flowers on the tomb of the man who is substituting for me.

[Pershing] said, 'We know that a certain percentage of the identified dead buried here are Jewish, so that same percentage should be represented as Jewish among the unknowns'" with a Star of David marker, explained Phil Rivers, who was superintendent of the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery when I visited. "World War I was the only war for which this was done. If you go to a World War II cemetery, all the unknowns are marked with crosses.

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.

Going back to Walter's house had been like visiting a cemetery where there were no tidy tombstones recording beginnings and endings but only question marks over the graves.

planned to come to DC next spring to pay my respects to your parents, but I will not be able to do that anymore. When you go visit them in the cemetery next time, please take along two bouquets, of white chrysanthemums or roses, on behalf of me and Sonya.

Memory is a cemetery I’ve visited once or twice

When your father died, I remember standing at his grave and thinking, This is the place where I can leave my grief. It wasn't immediately, of course, but I had somewhere to go, and every time I visited the cemetery, I felt like when I got back into my car, a tiny little bit of grief was gone.

People had been studying the mystery for years. Not just the students from Duke. Aside from the local historian—who seemed to have fathomed a plausible explanation, in Lexie’s opinion—at least two other outside groups or individuals had investigated the claim in the past without success. Mayor Gherkin had actually invited the students from Duke to pay the cemetery a visit, in the hope that they wouldn’t figure it out, either. And sure enough, tourist traffic had been picking up ever since. She supposed she could have mentioned that to Mr. Marsh yesterday. But since he hadn’t asked, she hadn’t offered. She was too busy trying to ward off his advances and make it clear she wasn’t interested in him. Oh, he’d tried to be charming… well, okay, he was sort of charming in

Julián is now the bathroom of the chief executive. That day, when I returned to the bookshop after visiting the old house, I found a parcel bearing a Paris postmark. It contained a book calledThe Angel

with more bombs being dropped on Malta in two months of 1942 than were dropped on London in a year. It was a time of fear and fatigue and disease, and jubilation when a convoy, bringing its precious cargo of food and ammunition and fuel, did get through. Now there was nothing here apart from the huts to serve as a reminder of those days. The aircraft pens had gone and the runway, which had been like the long handle of a warming pan, had become a road leading to the National Stadium. For me, searching into the past, there was nothing: this is not the Ta’ Qali that Peter Anderson would have seen. But not everything had changed so drastically. Mdina, the old capital of Malta, would be much as he had seen it, and the barracks where he and Tom had lived were still standing, so the young man at Ta’ Qali had said. There were some things I could see, some places I could visit. My spirits rose. I turned the car around and headed back, past the cemetery, to the roundabout; a signpost pointed to Mtarfa. The road was bumpy and full of potholes; it didn’t look as if it was much used nowadays. It wound up and up, between rubble walls which divided the road from the fields on either side. Over the tops of the walls and through gateways and gaps I could see maize growing, and prickly pears, and huge pumpkins drying on the flat

Look, Daniel. Destiny is usually just around the corner. Like a thief, a hooker, or a lottery vendor: its three most common personifications. But what destiny does not do is home visits. You have to go for it.

We place our dead in carefully tended cemeteries, strictly separate from the rest of our lives, only to be visited on anniversaries and special occasions. No one wants to be reminded of death.” Kamal

My husband and I have lived in Oregon for 55 years in Eugene, Portland, Neskowin and Hood River. We have explored much of Oregon and are avid readers of travel and history. We are familiar with Oregon’s bigoted history and Oregon’s positive and negative politics. From Bettie Denny’s fiction book I could picture places, people and events. The book begins and ends in the Lone Fir Cemetery founded in 1866 in southeast Portland. Murphy Gardener, a new Oregonian reporter, is assigned to cover the Halloween cemetery tales at the cemetery, meeting a black cat, and a new friend, Anji. Murphy and Anji soon meet for breakfast at the Zell Café and embark on a historical quest. Untangling a chain of events and people through maps, letters, photos and directories they sort though the detritus of lives. A photo and a dubious translation, ending at the Lone Fir Cemetery, give some probable answers to their quest. I love mysteries and Denny does an exquisite job of linking the present to the past. She visits The Oregon State Hospital Museum, Oregon Historical Society, Chinatown, Phil Knight Library, Columbia Gorge Discovery Center and Edgefield. She reads about suffrage, about the “incorrigible’” Abigail Scott Dunaway and her infamous brother Harvey Scott, publisher of the Oregonian. She uncovers past issues of sex slaves and current issues sex trafficking. She also showplaces current establishments such as the Bipartisan Café in Montavilla, The Sunshine Mills in The Dalles where she gathers with those who are aiding her in her historical quest. For those of you Oregonians who want a good mystery taking place in your own backyard, I recommend this book highly.

There was this new minister who went to the cemetery sorry, cemetery and he got his PhD and his DD and he’s got assign to his first church. I’ll never forget this. When he got there the church was a little lively but he was dead and he told the people now that am your new pastor we gonna do things a little different around here. He said, no more shouting, we’re going to do things in order. And theres going to be a quietness. He said I want you to follow my lead. He said I’ve graduated from the seminary and I’ve been educated and we’re going to do things in order and we’re going to take away this noise. It took him about 6 months to get things all tone down, he thought. He never even bothered to write his sermons out because some of the people were still shouting. But after 6 months he had everything under control and everything was dead. Dead quite. I mean quite. And finally he worked on his message all week long, had it all type written out on 15 pages, double space. Had everything perfect and now he is going to demonstrate his educational powers. Ready to wax eloquent and have them know they have an educated preacher/minister. He got into his message that he was reading. And he got to page 5, there was an ooooooooooooold fashion deacon in the back and let out one of them big old weeeeeeeeeeellllllllllllll gloryyyyyyyyyyyyyyy !!!!!. that was like an atom bomb that struck. And he became frustrated and all 15 pages of notes fell on the ground and he lost his place. He was never been so humiliated in all of his life. He could not finish his sermon. The only thing he could do is stop and pray and put the benediction on. He became so aggravated at the brother at the back. He said I did not know what I said to make him shout but he said am going to visit him in the morning and am going to found out what I said. And whatever I said am going to cut it out of my mind and I’ll never say it again so he won’t shout. Monday morning he headed out and he went to this brother who was a farmer. He didn’t even bother to go to the house. He wanted to handle this man to man. The brother offered a cup of coffee but the pastor refused it. He said I came out here to talk man to man sir. Do you remember when I first came to the church I said we were going to do things differently. He said yes sir I do remember. You remember I said nobody was going to make some noice. He said yes sir I remember that. He said yesterday you embarrassed me. I only got half way through my sermon. He said I want you to be honest with me brother. What was it that I said that made you shout because whatever it is am not going to say it no more. The brother breathed and said let get one thing straight pastor, you’ve been here six months. aint nothing you ever said made me shout. Nothing at all. But when I get to thinking how deep I was in sin and Jesus brought me out and cleaned me and wrote my name the book of life. How so good He’s been to me. When I was thinking of what He done for me, I couldn’t help but shoouuuuuuuuuuuuuuut to His gloryyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy. I don’t just shout in church, here with my mules thinking of Jesus, I feel another shouuuuuuuuuuuuut coming up.

When a society is rich, its people don't need to work with their hands; they can devote themselves to activities of the spirit. We have more and more universities and more and more students. If students are going to earn degrees, they've got to come up with dissertation topics. And since dissertations can be written about everything under the sun, the number of topics is infinite. Sheets of paper covered with words pile up in archives sadder than cemeteries, because no one ever visits them, not even on All Souls' Day. Culture is perishing in overproduction, in an avalanche of words, in the madness of quantity. That's why one banned book in your former country means infinitely more than the billions of words spewed out by our universities.