Cemeteries: A Place Of Peace And Comfort

Brenda Houts of Detroit Lakes, Minnesota has lost three teenage sons to death: one to suicide, one to a drowning and one to an auto accident. She has great insight into the grieving process. She sent me these thoughts on how a cemetery can be a place of solace, memory and peace.

Not too long ago, I was listening to a woman talk. She had been on a trip overseas. She said they had walked through some cemeteries looking at the flowers and markers. She made a big deal of how "ghoulish" and "creepy" that probably seems to most people.

My stepdaughter and I looked at each other right away. We both shook our heads. I said to Lyndsey, "She has never taken music to the cemetery to play, or laid down beside her sons’ grave and listened to his favorite song. She doesn’t know the peace and beauty of the final resting place here on earth."

The cemetery is the one place outside of our homes where we, who have lost a loved one, can show our respect, love, and honor for the entire world to see. It gives us a chance to remind people that this is a living part of our lives.

For some reason we are under the impression that when the "door of death" has slammed in our lives that it is closed and must remain closed. I do not believe that to be so.

I believe that death happens as much as life happens. You accept it as part of your living life. When death happens in your life it is not a closed door. It is an open doorway through which you travel learning much about life.

I would need a large book to fill in all the names of the people I have met because the door of death opened to me. I would need an even larger book to write all the things I have learned about life from death.

Don’t get me wrong here. I do not walk through this open doorway singing, dancing and rejoicing. I actually walk through it kicking, screaming and hollering; "Why me?"

I was seventeen when my father died. I viewed the cemetery as a place you buried the dead, brought flowers to a couple times a year, not much else. However, when my oldest child died I found the cemetery to be a place of peace and comfort.

I could go to the cemetery and see his name marked in the stone for all time. I had to face the truth each time I was there that he really had died. In the first weeks, I went there a lot. Whenever I felt the need to be some place where Javis was I went to the cemetery. It was somewhere I could fall on my knees and weep, cry, scream, holler, and pray.

As the weeks turned to months and the months to years, I went to the cemetery less often, but way more than just on Memorial Day. As each of my sons passed away, I found the cemetery to be a place of comfort and peace.

I take music for the boys to listen. I like going there to see whom else has remembered them, whose lives the boys touched. Sometimes I have found flowers or notes, sometimes - like at hunting season - it is shotgun shells.

I have taken friends and family there to sit by my sons’ graves. We have shared our lunch there on special occasions like birthdays and holidays. I cannot take everyone to the cemetery. Some people just do not understand.

Once long ago, I mentioned to a person that I had been at the cemetery. This person made a point of reminding me very strongly, "He is not there." She went on to tell me how she felt this behavior was strange and she does not like cemeteries and she would not go there. She said, "You have to move on."

I remember thinking, "Oh, girl, you just don’t know." I am glad for her that she still does not know. She does not know the horrific pain of losing a child. She does not know that the many things in life that you said "never" to, you just might find to be the "always" after a death.

I know of Moms who, on the first snowfall, took a blanket to their child’s grave, covering them. This was not because they thought the child was there but because they needed to do something, anything just to feel again.

In those first days when you are finding your way back to life after death, searching for answers. In those days when darkness out numbers the light and sadness is a more normal feeling than happiness, the cemetery is a comforting, peaceful place to rest and ponder this new life, a life where the door of death has opened.

You must learn to live with that door open. To close it would be to seal the pain inside and never feel happiness again. Death is part of this life we live.

When you see flowers, flags, and wreaths placed on the gravesites, take a moment, remember and honor our loved ones. Understand that we know they are not there but that going there gives us a small measure of comfort and peace.

Brenda Houts gives presentations on grief and also on teenage issues. She can be contacted at brendah@foreverthree.com.