Some of my favorite things from when I worked landscaping at a small town cemetery:
The things that got left on graves. 6-packs of beer, little boxes of chocolates or cookies, the occasional large Tim Hortons double double. My favorite was the one grave that on a Monday would always have a 6-pack with one can missing. Someone visited regularly and had a drink while they were there.
The veterans section, and how it was almost empty. Not that there weren’t veterans buried in the cemetery; there were tons, but they were buried beside their wives in family plots. Most of these guys went away for WW2, survived, came home, and were buried decades later, with people they loved, the rank carved on their headstone less important than the names of the children and grandchildren who remember them.
The way standing headstones make you take the time to trim the weeds around them every time you cut the grass, and give you the chance to slow down and read the inscriptions. There was probably a time I knew every name there.
The small metal markers in the back rows, only labeled with numbers. They took the place of old wooden crosses when the town was a little farming village. Somewhere in the museum they probably have a record of who was buried under each, but I never saw it.
The big plastic flower wreath (the kind people decorate wedding cars with) that spelled “MOM”. She was young, and her grave was so new she didn’t have a headstone yet. She had 5 little kids, and they’d made it for her.
The stones lined up by the landscaping shed, carved with their inscriptions and waiting for their graves to settle so we could place them. The little printed or hand-decorated paper signs loved ones taped to the temporary plaques they would replace.
The guerrilla wildflowers planted around grave markers. We weren’t supposed to leave them when we cut the grass, but we tried to anyway.
Walking through the tiny local museum and putting faces and items to the names I knew from grave markers. Esme and her room full of quilts and knitting. The old veterans who lived to their 80s and 90s, fresh-faced in pressed new uniforms before they left for the war more than half a century ago. Pictures of young couples grinning in front of houses I recognised from my recycling pickup rounds, whose names I recognised from their shared plots.
The signs of life among the dead: lawn chair prints in the grass, kid’s snack wrappers that didn’t quite make it into the trash, elastic bands from bouquets, a place where someone sat cross-legged in the grass long enough to leave an imprint, a family’s worth of footprints in the muddy roadway.
Cemeteries may house the dead, but they exist for the living, and they’re a fascinating place where life and death exist side by side. There’s something really cool about a place where the dead are remembered and the living feel less alone because of it.
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