I love cemeteries. I know, I know. Creepy girl, creepy girl! But the fact is that as a Christian, I don’t find them depressing. Not so much a resting place…more like a pit stop for the body while the soul goes ahead to check into the party. (on a side note, my boss recently asked me what I thought Heaven would be like…a close family member of hers had just died, and I said, “y’know those moments when you say, ‘it absolutely can’t get better than this’? I think that those are the moments that God gives us a taste…and then He’s going to prove that we are gloriously wrong.”)

So anyway, I rather enjoy cemeteries. It provides a peaceful place to walk with good reading to boot. I like to make up little stories about the person’s life as I pass their gravestone. I still go to the grave of one of my best friends who died in high school. The sapling that his family planted at his burial is now a full-blown tree. I’m not saying that his death was a happy thing or that I don’t still miss him and have little pangs of mourning, but the cemetery doesn’t hold him any more than this earth could. And the memory of all those flowers that covered the grave still makes me smile a little.

In truth, I’ve only seen one thing in a cemetery that truly depressed me. It was a grave marker of a man who died at a rather young age, in his 40s, and his wife (also in her 40s) had put up her grave marker at the time of his burial. I knew this woman as an acquaintance and she’s so vibrant and, well, alive. It seems wrong for her gravestone to be sitting there, ready and waiting. And all I know is that if I were her 12 year old kid, I’d be pretty freaked out.

But maybe it gives her some peace. I know that they were linked at the heart. Maybe to heal she needs them to be linked in stone as well.