Living Among Headstones:
Life in a Country Cemetery — by Shannon Applegate

 

 

 

 

 

Lee, a retired Church of the Brethren minister, and civil rights leader, was a rosy, dome-browed gnome of a man, who knew about shadows. During the 1960s, Lee, Dana, and their children participated in an experiment in ecumenical living at the York Cooperative in Chicago. The Church of the Brethren conferred on Lee the special title of Minister of Peace when he began working with Martin Luther King and Andrew Young, going into towns where peace marches were planned and attempting to smooth the way with officials in advance.

Lee had seen faces contorted with hate in the Southern towns he visited. He met people who swore the streets would run with blood if marchers came. Later, alongside the black men who were his friends, quaking in his shoes and sweating profusely as one of the few whites marching, Lee saw the dark side: mild-looking churchgoing mothers and suit-wearing town fathers spitting, cursing, and hurtling brickbats at him.

But light, Lee insisted, always accompanied him, following him to the last days and even after, it seems. When I went to see Dana just after Lee slipped away, I stood at their kitchen window, taking in rows of grapes, gardens, fruit and nut trees flagged scarlet and gold with the season. Beyond was a landscape tiered with rain where the mountain stood--Mount Yoncallamy mountain. Only it was Lee's, too. He saw its opposite side in the lovely valley where he made his home for some twenty years just four miles or so from the cemetery.

Truly, I've never seen the like: two rainbows. I stood watching them arching high above the summit--one glowing over the other, colors luminous and splendid. Then light flooded over Lee's valley and through the window.

I realized this morning, driving into the cemetery, as mist and sun sifted through high solemn columns of cedar, fir, and madrone, that it is no longer possible to see across the expanse of these five acres. The shaggy, thigh-thick bough of Douglas fir extending over the spot where Dana intends to bring Lee's ashes is an example of a problem that is emerging all over the cemetery. Some black-green lower branches of these giants are drooping low, some in candelabrum curves touching the ground. They sway and break during high winds that sometimes lay siege to Cemetery Ridge as if to say, "You old fellows up here are too proud and tall for your own good."

The tree by Lee's grave, the only large tree in the southeast section, is stout enough that three little girls could not link hands around it. This spot now feels far too sheltered. Besides, the lovely view is compromised. Why are so many of us concerned with the view in a cemetery? Whose view? Our own, I suppose.

When Dana stood here a few moments ago taking in this shaggy gloom, she shivered a little, brushing the tip of this offending bough as though inspecting too-long hair on some youngster she was about to hustle off for a haircut. She said, "Let's just give this a trim, shall we? It's too much. Lee liked it, but it's overgrown now."

"Now Shannon, do I assume correctly that it is up to you what goes on now? I mean you have the say-so, don't you? Or do you have to go through your father?" Then she added something that made me wince, "It's all overgrown, isn't it? A rustic, natural look is one thing, but..."

Perhaps she saw my face. Never, ever play cards, people tell me.

She looked me over and sighed, saying, "Well, I'm sure you'll take care of all this as you are able, Shannon. All these trees are beautiful, but they are going to need some care."

Then she asked me which way "the head goes." Grandchildren were looking for a perfect sandstone boulder on the farm to bring to the cemetery to serve as a headstone for their grandpa. But at which end of the plot should it be placed?

In general, how were graves supposed to be oriented? East to west? Because, if that were the case, many people's headstones were placed incorrectly. What about the width of the alleyways between plots? Exactly how large was a double plot, anyway? When she was ready to part with Lee's ashes, could she come up and dig a hole herself? Was it legal? What about putting Lee's ashes in a planter of some kind? And when her ashes were brought up here someday was it all right to mingle them with Lee's? Did they have to have permission? Because that was what they'd discussed. She and Lee would be in there together with lavender or maybe a lily.

Lee and Dana as fertilizer. Bone meal. That made sense. But as to the rest, I had no idea. It's better not to ask a lame sexton too many questions, I wanted to tell her.

Lame in more ways than one. My foot is hurting. I feel sad and awkward. I am a close friend of an elderly woman whose husband, a man I admired and adored, has just died. Suddenly, I am also a sexton--some sort of semi-official. At home I have a sheaf of papers that were sent to Dad when he registered the cemetery as a state corporation. Laws and statutes fatten the thick manual from the Cemetery and Mortuary Commission. Even I, a book woman, an incessant researcher, can't bring myself to read this dry stuff. It scares me. It will tell me what I have to do and what will happen to me if I don't.

A writing woman; not an on-the-ground, hands-on kind of woman. A friend once said to me, "Why, you would rather read about an adventure than have one, wouldn't you?"

As for getting these trees limbed--how many are there? Fifty? A hundred? Where will the money come from? We're not officially a non-profit but we might as well be. Thank God mowing is not upon us until spring.

Upon "us"?

How many hands will it take to eradicate poison oak whose scarlet triumvirate of leaves blaze against the gray of granite baby lambs and Eastern Stars on old headstones I'm passing, as I limp and pitch up the slope trying to reach my car.

And who will hack her way into the humps of blackberries coiling on the sagging fences I can see as I pause and turn to look below?

"Not if she can help it," I tell myself.

(continued on the next page)

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