When I was a child, my mother considered a trip to a cemetery an entertainment.  I remember Mama, my sister Nan and me taking picnics to whichever cemetery we were visiting so that we would be able to spend the whole day there uninterrupted, reading tombstones.  Some were family cemeteries out in the country; some were church cemeteries with a connection to my kin; and some were just great big old cemeteries in promising locations that looked interesting, but had no known (yet) family connection.  Much later, when I became an adult, I came to realize that this was a fairly strange way to spend leisure time.

Actually I enjoyed going on a these "special outings" and having a break from the routines of my slow-paced, small-town childhood existence.  The only negative I can recall was snakes.  There were many positives (in addition to the change-of-pace and the picnics).  I particularly liked finding statues marking graves --they were my favorites.  I carry inside me a lifelong love of sculpture that probably originated here.

I am attentive to and impressed with the message in any variation from the norm of burial customs, such as the headboard-of-the-bed tombstone in the Charleston, S.C. cemetery --the headboard from a shared marriage bed placed over the young wife's grave by a distraught husband.  Or the engraved car on the tombstone of the teenager in Fort Valley, Georgia who loved his Chevy and died in it in a wreck.

I'll never forget the first time I became aware of cremation as an option.  Instead of a little baby grave, there was this square stone in the baby section of the Evergreen Cemetery in Perry, Georgia.  The stone had the baby's name, parentage and date of birth and death, plus a metal bump which, when explored, lifted out to become a little metal vase on a chain.  My older sister figured this out to her satisfaction and explained to me that probably the young parents were stationed at the Warner Robins Air Force Base 20 miles away, and that they had their baby cremated so that, when they got transferred to another airbase, they could clip the chain and take their baby's ashes with them.  Every time we went to Evergreen Cemetery, I would go check whether the vase was gone.

I also became intrigued with African American burial customs because of finding conch shells and broken pottery on these graves.  I was acquainted with their burial society costumes because my father's store special-ordered bolts of peacock blue polished cotton material one year for the local members to use to sew matching dresses for "The Good Samaritan Sisters Burial Society".  Life in the 50's may not have been particularly good for Perry’s African American community, but its members certainly did plan and look forward to a spectacular exit.  It saddened my heart that in the South of my childhood, these warm people were second class citizens even in death, reflected in burial sites and in cemetery conditions. Their own community, however, made the funerals first-class events.

My “burial customs fascination” spilled beyond cemetery boundaries.  My piano teacher "Miss Willie" had a framed hair wreath in the front vestibule of her home.  When a member of her family died, a lock of hair was taken from the corpse; and it was woven into a flower shape.  These family hair-flowers were woven together into a treasured “keepsake wreath”.  Waiting my turn for piano lessons, I contemplated that wreath, listening to my older sister’s musical performance.  I wondered why my father's family didn't have a flower-hair wreath.  I knew why I would never see such for Mama's side of the family --she was an orphan and had been brought up in an orphanage.

Now I realize that Mama took us to cemeteries because she was looking for something she was missing --her own family.  Her sense of loss extended beyond people's graves to her place in and "connectedness" to history.  To compensate, Mama began tracing her family tree and joining restrictive historical "pedigree societies" --the United Daughters of the Confederacy, the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Colonial Dames, and ultimately the Daughters of the Magna Carta.

It should come as no shock to anyone who knows this background information about my mother that here is a lady who's going to take her epitaph seriously.  Mama kept a notebook of engravings from people's graves that particularly captured her attention.  After much careful thought, she decided that for her epitaph, instead of a scripture verse, she wanted "Daughter of" information carved on her tombstone.  (Poor thing; she was no one's daughter starting at age two, thanks to the Great Influenza Epidemic of 1918.)  My mother has a definite tendency toward over-compensation.  She became determined not only to list her parents but to also cite the names of her grandparents and great-grandparents.  Furthermore, she wants the hometown or county of each also carved beside their names on her tombstone.  One of my father's many favorite jokes is that Mama will fill her tombstone, end with "Continued on next tombstone", and then proceed to fill his also, in order to list her entire tree.

Coming from such a heritage, I have also put some serious thought into my own epitaph.  For a long time, I planned for it to be a paraphrase from Chaucer’s description of the Scholar in the Canterbury Tales -- “Gladly would she teach, and as gladly learn.”  For a while I believed my epitaph should be, “She did the best she could, all things considered,” because that is the truest thing you could say about me.  I didn’t add the other part (“--and it was never enough”) because I recognize that I’m living in this world, not Heaven: it’s not supposed to be whole and perfect yet.  My hope is that I operate in the center of God’s will, and that my efforts, through Christ, are sufficient.  At present my choice of epitaph is “She stepped outside of time and into the presence of God,” because it looks forward, not backward.