The days are running together. I find I have to keep asking Chuck what day it is. We are enjoying our mostly twice daily visits with Chuck’s Dad. On one of the two single visit days, we drove down with Chuck’s sister to the Tahoma National Cemetery where their Mom is buried. Because Dad is a veteran of World War II, Mom and Dad were entitled to be buried there if they wished. I mean no disrespect when I say that, just as we have on previous trips, we wanted to visit the entire family while here in Washington. It was a cold, gray day that brought sleet, rain, hail, and snow. Even on a raw, stormy day, Tahoma is a beautiful, peaceful and well-maintained cemetery. The above is a photo from a few years ago (taken with our old camera) on a sunny day when Mount Rainier was not fully shrouded in clouds.
Just a few days ago, the following was included in an e-mail we received from Ancestry.com:
This is a Cemetery…
Lives are commemorated,
Deaths are recorded,
Families are reunited,
Memories are made tangible and
Love is undisguised.
This is a Cemetery...
Communities accord respect,
Families bestow reverence,
Historians seek information and
Our Heritage is thereby enriched.
Testimonies of devotion, pride and warmth are carved in stone to pay warm tribute to accomplishments and to the life, not the death, of a loved one.
The cemetery is homeland for memorials that are a sustaining source of comfort to the living.
A cemetery is a history of a people, a perpetual record of yesterday and a sanctuary of peace and quiet today.
A cemetery exists because every life is worth loving and remembering – always.
--- From the Lutheran All Faiths Cemetery brochure
Middle Village, New York
author unknown
"Beloved Wife and Mother"
"Beloved Husband and Father"
"Forever in Our Hearts"
"Dancing Together In Heaven"
"Everyone Knew Him As Bud"
"He Finally Got His Wings"
Those are just a few of the inscriptions etched on the headstones of Mom’s neighbors.
A cemetery exists
because every life is worth loving and remembering – always.
1 comment:
lee, i love that photo. i love cemeteries. i know that sounds a bit ghoulish. i like to walk through them and read the headstones. at the one where my favorite grandmother is buried, my parents are also interred. i often go and sit at grandma's grave side and talk to her. it's always so peaceful there.
well, except on lawn mowing days.
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