Cemetery Visit Post for Tuesday September 14th

Instead of going to Tiger Flowers Cemetery, I went to Townsend House Cemetery. I stayed for at least 40 minutes. As a commuter student, it was difficult for me to make a trip to Tiger Flowers Cemetery that fit in my schedule. Townsend is less than five minutes from my house. It is also where my great-grandmother was buried when she died in 2006. Her name was Alice. I can't say that I ever had a period of mourning for her when she died. Before you think I am cold and heartless I have to explain why. I mourned her loss even while she was still alive. You see, we knew she was dying. She had dementia, which slowly causes memories and knowledge of everyday tasks to be lost. She hadn't been right for a long time, probably around six or seven years before she died. For the last three years or more of her life she didn't know me by name. She thought I was a woman named Joanne who was almost forty by then. She was still thinking of Joanne as a teenager just as she still thought of me as the little girl she made rice crispy treats with. You want to know something funny? Alice had lied about her age so many times over the years that she didn't even remember what year she was born in. We had to put off getting her headstone until we could find out her real birthday. Her favorite thing to eat was McDonald's chicken nuggets. She got her hair done every Friday because she always wanted to look her best. At least until she started to get worse. The loss of my great-grandmother wasn't nearly as tragic as C.S. Lewis' loss of his wife. I can't pretend to imagine what he felt like, even after reading A Grief Observed. In fact, I think the book showed me that I know even less about grief than I had thought. As I walked through the rest of the cemetery I wondered how many people buried there were still remembered and missed. I also wondered how many had been forgotten. I saw headstones there with death dates before the 1850s and even more that I couldn't read because age had made the etchings unreadable. I am including a few pictures from the cemetery. I know that nobody else visited this one so I want you to see it, too.