Words from the Dead
You don’t need a séance to get a message from beyond. A walk through most cemeteries will do. “Going, but know not where,” reads Phineas G. Wright’s monument, a large granite block incised with his face in a slight frown and eyes suggesting worry. Buried in 1918 in Putnam, Connecticut’s Grove Street
Cemetery, he’s dressed in a formal suit, a bald man with a long chin beard. “Gone, but hope not lost,” is a similar but less uncertain message carved into a small, simple brownstone slab memorializing William Allin who died in Windsor in 1701. “Not my will, but thine be done,” reads the great impresario P.T. Barnum’s 1891 marker in Bridgeport’s Mountain Grove Cemetery, perhaps expressing a bit of resistance and resignation. Carved in stone during three different centuries is ambivalence over final departure, probably a common feeling then, now, and for eternity. I can almost hear their voices fading in a last gasp.
Cemeteries are three dimensional storybooks. Sure, they are dominated by stone from humble tablets to grand mausoleums, but they are also filled with words. These are stones that talk. Although most are a sort of account book or registry of names and dates, often with a few clichéd words about
mortality and heaven, many contain messages from the dead or a biographical snippet that conjures an image, a wisp of personality, or a moment in history. As time goes on and memories fade, bodies below ground come to matter less than the words above.
Cemeteries may be solemn, somber, even tragic places. They are filled with beautiful sculpture, architecture, and inscribed artwork from colonial death angels to contemporary laser images of everything from boats to animals. But, it’s the words that move me most, that at times almost seem to make the dead come alive. Walk through most cemeteries and you will find poetry, humor, preaching, tales of good deeds and misdeeds, mystery, and history. And you don’t have to adventure far to find wonderful stories literally written in stone. Those below are but a tiny sampling from my small home state of Connecticut. There is so much more to explore, even nearby.