Walking Dead

Photos and Reflections on Exploring an Old Cemetery

We love old cemeteries. We’d rather spend a day walking and old graveyard than exploring the latest hip refurbished gentrified hot-spots in a city.

We visited Nachitoches, LA, an historical treasure of early American history. One of the sites is the American Cemetery near the new hip gentrified cool old downtown. It is the oldest still “in business” graveyard in Louisiana with graves dating back to 1737.

I walked among the dead. Each grave contained a person with a history, a geneology, relationships bonded, broken and healed, sins committed and repented of or not, accomplishments, failures, and ripples of influences far beyond their funerals. They are who we will be.

The untended, desecrated, rotting graves themselves speak of the finitude and futility of even our attempts to honor and memorialize the beloved (or hated) dead. The iron of familial love rusts. The memories engraved in the stone of our intentions is worn illegible by time and the torrents of our own immediate histories and cares.

The headstones are a synopsis of sorrows unimaginable.

The precision of time is the exponent of pain.

The beautiful work of human hands returns to earthly dissolution, perhaps to remind us of our own, yet beside it the same earth brings forth life and beauty.

His grave is fractured, broken by forces beyond powers beyond life and the grave. His wife had died before him and “grief oppressed him”, perhaps it broke his spirit. Yet he was “cherished by faith and hope”, perhaps beyond the grave where her faith and hope drew him out of his oppression into her joy.

The iron gates of our resolve to never forget are assaulted and broken down by the cares of the present world and the attention it demands.

The weeds of forgetfulness grow strong and tall even in the grandest memorial.

Even the stones cry out, “Death is our final brokeness.”

I wonder why the pants are still hanging here… were they making love on the grave to existentially or spiritually connect the little death and the big death or just fucking for the hell of it? Was it interrupted by “Security” or the insecurity of the presence of demons, angels, or the offended (or playful) departed?

But as dusk approaches so does the soft gladsome light of peace. The graves, even in disrepair, dissolution, illegibility, conquered by nature, forgotten by man, are beautiful.

They bring forth the spring, defying the cold, dead winter.

In the shadow of the tablets of stone that witness to death, they live…

And a Seed will find the weakness of death, die in its dark crevice and come forth and adorn its invincible facade with life. As will we all.

The path to life is only walked through that which has fallen and died before us. This is The Way.