Knox County cemeteries are fragile pages of history

MOUNT VERNON — In my rambles throughout history, I find the majority of my insights in books, census reports, newspaper articles and the like. That suits me, bookish creature that I’ve always been.

But I always welcome the chance to get out and tramp to sites where I can more directly engage with history. 

For that reason, I find that a lot of my expeditions involve traipsing around in old cemeteries and graveyards.

Why do we bury people? Not every culture has done this.

You hear about certain cultures where bodies are left out to be picked clean by scavengers, and of course there’s always the Vikings, whom we picture sending some chieftain off to rest in a burning longboat. 

But there have been burials marked by stones for thousands of years. A stone signifies permanence, so burying a person and putting up a stone is staking a claim for their memory.

The irony is that the stones end up lasting for millennia, while the person under the stone is forgotten.

Part of my business with this column is trying to capture a few of those memories before they slip away, and I’ve had some pretty remarkable successes doing that.

But while I was recently on one of my expeditions, I encountered a cemetery where the freezing and thawing of winter was heaving stones in every which direction.

Some of the stones in this boneyard had broken and become removed from their original positions, and were propped up against a nearby tree. 

I’m not naming the cemetery, because this isn’t meant to be a criticism. It’s what happens.

God bless the people who are either paid or volunteer to reset stones and clean up these places after winter, because they are caretakers to a very fragile face of our shared history. 

Our world would be so much paler without these three-dimensional memory books. And that’s why I sometimes feel sad that many folks today opt for cremation instead of burial.

It’s everyone’s right to do that, and it makes sense in that if we all keep living and dying and burying our forebears, we’d eventually fill up every spot.

Look at old cities like Rome and Paris, where they had to remove old bones to catacombs in order to make space for new graves. 

But I can’t get over the sheer thrill of finding the last resting spot of someone that I’m writing about.

I search for documents and information, trying to bring the spark of life into a story, and sometimes for a while, it feels just like that: a story, something that could maybe be a piece of fiction.

Then I come face to face with a cold stone with the name of the person I’m writing about, and it all becomes so incredibly real.

That person’s physical body rests in the dirt at my feet. I’m standing in the place where those who missed this person stood and cried. Or, in some cases, 

I’m standing next to a grave that some people may have spat at, if they were enemies. It’s all so human, so real.

I don’t know what we’ll have in the future.

What will some central Ohio local historian in 2125 have to visit and connect with, after we’ve given up burials and started incinerating the dead in rockets shot at the sun?

Let’s treasure these history treasure maps known as cemeteries while we have them. I encourage everyone to help anywhere volunteers are accepted, or to make donations for upkeep wherever possible. 

I used to send a little money every year to a man who volunteered to mow a country cemetery in Kentucky where some of my ancestors were buried. He’s long gone, now. I don’t even know if anyone mows the place any more.

So, next time you want to connect a little with the visceral memory of the place you live, go spend some time in one of our beautiful town cemeteries, or at a quiet country graveyard, and read a few headstones.

You may find yourself wondering about the rest of story.

Maybe I’ll see you there.