More Cemetery Pictures

Here’s some more snaps from Lone Fir. It was beautiful in the late afternoon sunshine that day. I was ready to dig myself a nice hole right then and there... as opposed to the first time I went, a month or so ago, when I felt differently about the place. It was a super damp, gray day, after weeks of solid rain. The whole cemetery seemed like a swamp of mud with the tombstones leaning Halloweenishly every which way – while in reality only some are leaning, the old old ones. Also, only a few days before, that cyclist named Nick was killed right on the corner there, and his ghost bike had been newly installed. So the whole scene was one big bummer, and I thought, this isn’t the right place. Now that I’ve seen it at the height of spring, though, with all the flowers blooming and the sun filtering through the myriad kinds of trees (I think it’s been officially proclaimed an arboretum), I’m reconsidering.

I have several more options to look at. It has to be a place I feel sure Pop would like. I can’t ask him, though, I mean I can’t bring him to a graveyard and ask him how he likes it and would he like to pick out a plot for himself. It's about twenty years too late for that. I suspect one can only handle that when one feels reasonably far away from death. He’s about 84 now, but mainly he has Alzheimers. So even though he’s always appeared to have a great sense of humor about his death, and still jokes about it frequently and writes and re-writes Edward Lear style epitaphs for himself, I’m afraid if it came right down to actual plot selection, he’d be bummed. Or horrified or something. Worse, he might get stuck on a jag and come up with a question about it, like “Where am I going to be buried?” which he’d ask my mother every ten or fifteen minutes for the next 72 hours. And then my mother would also be bummed.

So forget that idea. His offspring will have to make that choice for him. I’ll narrow it down to a few options, then poll the others.