Headstones That Preach

She drove the familiar hour-long trek to the family cemetery, the place where her people are buried. Carrying an assortment of garden tools and summer annuals, my mother stopped first at the grave of her brother Floyd whose body she had watched waste away from the ravages of muscular dystrophy. Another brother, a veteran decorated for his efforts at Normandy, lies at rest nearby as do two sisters. She knelt in the spongy ground, tidied up the grass near the headstones, and decorated the graves with a single red geranium surrounded by dusty miller and purple petunias. Her parents, the hard-working, God-fearing farmer and his wife, are buried down a steep hill from their children. She felt bad; my mother did, because she wasn’t sure she would have made it safely down the hill while carrying gardening tools. My mother will be eighty-two years old this summer and is one of the few remaining who tends the family graves.

I don’t know where I’m going to be buried. Although I’ve lived in New England for over twenty-five years I still don’t think of it as home, as the place anyone would return to pay their respects. Maybe most people my age don’t think about things like final arrangements and cemetery plots, but my people always cared about where their people were buried. They decorated their graves. They honored their lives. They remembered.

And these graves my mother tends bear witness. They proclaim that her loved ones were buried in the sure and certain hope of the resurrection. It’s a shame, I think, that few churches are built anymore which include cemeteries on the grounds, grave markers facing east. I blame local planning and zoning boards for the shift. Because while sitting in a church pew and looking out to where faithful saints lie at rest, one can hear headstones preach:  And the dead in Christ will rise first, and the mortal will be clothed in immortality; this we believe.

I’ve talked to a number of people who say they just want to be cremated. It’s simple, they say, and less expensive. Cremation probably has less environmental impact than burying dead people. Besides, some have said, I don’t want anyone coming to a funeral home and looking at me like I’m on display.

Maybe they’re right. But I think it’s fitting to honor the bodies God gave us, the ones in which we first heard and responded to the gospel, received the waters of baptism, tasted and saw that the Lord was good in communion, and labored to build His kingdom. We are not spirits in a material world; we are flesh and blood, image-bearers of God on high. And it is in that flesh that we will one day see God, in bodies raised from the perishable to the imperishable. While it’s true that God is able to restore even those bodies destroyed by fire or lost at sea, I think those examples are beside the point. Any time God hands me an opportunity to bear witness to the gospel, to that sure and certain hope of the resurrection, I intend to take it. Even if I’m dead.

Now I just need to find a plot of land. And people to tend my grave.

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