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Here lies...
While doing walking around one of Providence's large old cemetery's yesterday (the North Burial Ground off of Main St, near Branch Ave), Lauren and I saw some very interesting tombstones. One of the first that caught our attention was one of a young man who'd died in his mid-20s. On one side, with his name and dates, was a picture embedded in the stone and coated in some sort of hard transparent shell. On the back was a poem or song or... whatever, written by the deceased. On the picture, I'm torn between thinking it's a bit creepy and thinking it's a very nice touch. It's it is creepy in some way, isn't that just because there's a part of us that finds it easier to look at an impersonal field of stone rather than confronting all the lives that were and now are not? Isn't there something to be said for the humanizing power of a picture to give the dead some life? And isn't there something to be said for letting the dead speak and say something in their own words? Leaving aside any questions of literary merit, the fact is that they are his words. Kind of cool.
Another tombstone, for a couple, had an older black-and-white photo of the couple in a sort of locket-like setting, which allowed it to be closed. You could see the people, but you weren't forced to. It seemed pretty sturdy too, as well as rather beautiful.
I haven't included any of the photos I took because, although it's unlikely that they would either see them or be offended by them, I wouldn't want to add any measure of pain to those whose loved ones are depicted. Here, though, is a rather more historical marker, the stone for the first mayor of Providence:
I have additional pictures of each side, but rather than making you load even more photos, I'll just summarize to say that one gives the basic facts that he was the first mayor and born in Seekonk, MA and his dates and all, another side talks about what a good person he was and how everybody liked him, another talks about what a great man he was to his family and his community, and then finally one talks about his professional career. It is, of course, dehumanizing in the way that most eulogies are: he's made over into a sort of lower-order saint, and while I'm sure he probably did have lots of great qualities, he was almost certainly human.
Even before I read Orson Scott Card's Speaker for the Dead, I think I agreed with its basic idea: the idea of trying to neither praise nor blame the dead, but to understand who the person really was, in fullness of humanity. Maybe that's too much to hope for in most cases, but it's a noble goal, isn't it?
Anyway, like the first stone I mentioned, this one had the virtue of at least giving some indication of who the deceased was in life instead of just giving a name and a date. I rather appreciated it in both cases.
What are your thoughts on tombstones? As always, your thoughts are most appreciated.