Portrait of a Cemetery

I love cemeteries, especially if they are old. It is a love birthed from the ancient, neglected Jewish cemeteries of Europe, where the communities are gone, but their dead remain– where the bodies have turned green and reach up from the ground in dense, leafy life. There is no stillness in these cemeteries, but rather a symphony of the subtlest movements, a feeling that the sway of each blade of grass may be a possession.

The best cemeteries are the ones that seem more a collection of lives than a collection of deaths. The sterile, separated plots in newer cemeteries have a hard time accomplishing this.

George took me to a cemetery off of Main Street, at the Episcopal Church of the Advent. I have fallen in love with it.

We spent quite a while there, getting to know the families that have been in Spartanburg for sometimes over a century. Mrs. Legare outlived her husband by almost 70 years. She was 99 when she died; he was 28, but it seems she never had another love. She still insisted on being buried next to him. If there was a heaven, and it was sort of like earth, what a strange pair they would make, Mr. Thomas Jones Jr. and his grandmother of a lover.

And poor Hattie Hazard who lies next to her infant son, given to her and taken from her all in her 23rd year. It does not appear there were more children, or perhaps they lived to an age where they could die far from their mother.

There is the mother so consummate in her role that she is nameless.

There is Edward, an only child, who at 15, “drowned in the little Miami River near Cincinnati, OH in a heroic effort to rescue a companion.” His epitaph reads: “Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.”

There are enough small children to fill a playground, a testament to harder times. They are the “faultless before the throne,” as one epitaph of a 22 month old child suggests. This is the child I love, dead for a century, Baby Newton Starr:

There are stones eroded by time and weather. George commented on the irony of it all– carving their names in stone so they will never be forgotten, but it is useless.

And so many wonderful epitaphs:

Vannoy Vernon Cleveland, 1884-1925: “A quiet and gentle spirit. He loved all God’s handiwork and others more than himself.”

T. Sumter Means, M.D., 1833-1900: “Captain in the first Florida Infantry U.S.A. during the first two years of Confederate War Wounded at Shiloh and taken prisoner./ In 1863 made full Surgeon in the Confederate Army. Remained in service until the surrender. For many years Vestryman and Warden for the Church of the Advent./ ‘Our echoes roll from soul to soul and live forever and forever.’”

And this woman, a woman I cannot help but think of as a personal friend:

Margaret Cleveland Guittard, 1919-1992: “How did it ever get so late?”