My final stop today was in the South Cemetery in Wendell Massachusetts. It was really weird. I had a moment of deja vu when I saw it. I don’t know when it was but I know I have passed this cemetery before and I knew then I wanted to see it but if I remember correctly it was another hot summer day and I was coming home from somewhere else, again enjoying the back roads. I didn’t stop then but I knew I had to today. Something there was calling me. So I parked badly on the little grass hill in front of the cemetery and headed in with my camera.
The cemetery is located at a fork in the road. There was traffic going by but I have no idea where they were going. This place was sparsely inhabited. Still, the two cars that drove by slowed down to see what crazy person was out here, alone, in an old cemetery in the woods.
For some reason I was being drawn to the back right corner exactly the opposite of where I parked. I passed by an old crypt, took a quick shot, and then noticed something very odd. Here sitting quietly in the shade were two of the most unusual stones I had ever seen in New England. In fact they weren’t stones at all. One was a wooden cross with another chunk of wood sitting at its base, the appropriate details burned into it and laying atop a circle of random rocks. It was a burial that wouldn’t look out of place in the Old West but here in New England it was odd. Even weirder still was the plot next to it which held no cross, just a lump of wood, again with all the usual data seared into it. This was the first time I’d seen a wooden memorial. It seemed so… impermanent. Was that the point? To be remembered and then forgotten entirely once living memory was lost? A dead bird sat in front of them, perhaps left by a cat. It was a bit eerie, certainly the first time I’ve found a headless animal sitting atop a grave.
I couldn’t stop staring at the memorial. The more I looked the more weird details came to the surface. There was a tiny purse hanging from the cross. Why? This was the last resting place of a man. Was it left by an old girlfriend? I don’t know why but I was very saddened by this particular plot. Whoever was here was young when he died – too young. And it was recently. Only 2015. The epitaph read, “Live life real.” I could have seen him alive and never have known it. And the plot next to him read “matriarch” and was only three years later. Was that his mother? Did she die from a broken heart? My own grandmother outlived two of her five children who died in adulthood and… she was never the same.
I sat staring at these two plots for quite a while. So many questions. There were a lot of other Stebbins here. Clearly the family has been buried here for a long time – but they all got stones. It’s odd. The purse seemed to hint someone was still around who cared. Who visited. But the fact that the marker was so… cheaply made and impermanent just didn’t settle right with me. I wondered if they couldn’t afford a stone. It happens sometimes. I looked them up when I got home but none of my questions were answered. If anything their obituaries just brought up more mystery. I eventually pulled myself away.
Not to far away in the same back row another stone caught my eye. It looked pretty typical until you looked closer at it and realized instead of any of the usual motifs it was a hammer with angel wings and an odd inscription, “In peace, through work; joy” And then I realized this was another person who died young. This just made me wonder more. However this person had literally no traces online having died in 1977. So recently and yet not enough.
By now I was feeling pretty strange. Usually as I walk through rows of stones I do have curiosity but this odd sense of being pulled, this mystery, and the overall sadness was new. I don’t know what or who was there but I don’t think I was alone. I wandered through some of the older markers and made note of some of the prose. One was short and cryptic, “Death sure will come, the time unknown.” That is certainly true of Alonzo Granger who “..died from shock from railway accident when his chest was crushed and his feet were cut off.” Brutal. This mixed with my previous experience here today just made me feel like what I was doing right now – living my life to its fullest, exploring, traveling, learning, meeting new people, it’s all the right thing to be doing. I had a moment of gratitude before I finally left and decided to call it a day. I shall be back to this area. It was far to beautiful and poetic to leave behind forever.
