How Much Time Have You Spent in Cemetaries?

That's the question I wanted to ask the twenty-something who was sitting behind me in the restaurant this evening. I had to get up and leave before the urge to take him by the scruff of the neck and rattle his teeth for him got too strong. The topic of conversation -- or, rather, monologue -- that was being loudly aired was childhood vaccinations. The speaker was waxing passionate over the unnatural introduction of toxic substances into the body and how vaccinations were more dangerous than the diseases they were intended to prevent and about the children he would father in the future who would never be endangered by them. I very much wanted to get up and ask him: "How much time have you spent in cemetaries?"

I have spent time in cemetaries. I've spent time in cemetaries for historical research, to identify the location of family plots, simply to walk and take in the reflections of the tastes and lives and loves of people long gone. I spent time talking to an elderly lady who came to walk the aisles and visit with her parents and husband in the family plot and with a long-dead baby sister who was buried -- oh, she wasn't quite sure where. The family of an itenerant lumberjack hadn't been able to afford a coffin, let alone a headstone. The child, felled by some unnamed childhood disease, had been buried in a boot box in a donated plot somewhere near a large tree.

Another question I have for this young man: "Do you really want to return to a time when parents buried three or more children in the space of a week?" I've seen those headstones, too, lined up along the edges of family plots, rows of little lambs sleeping among lilies, with birth dates ranging over years but dates of death all too close together. Those parents didn't have a choice, they didn't have a way to stop the death that came for their children. We do. Those parents would have been amazed, thrilled by what we can do for our children -- and, knowing what they knew, bewildered by what some of us would refuse to do.