Apropos of nothing, a nifty article by a college student who interned on the Colbert Report: [link]

the idea of a grave sitting untended and unvisited for years on end is somehow awful.

This is an important point in some volunteer work I'm doing for the Congressional Cemetery where John Phillips Souza, Hoover, and a boat load of 18th century senators are buried.

It's private property now, and has been turned into a dog park. The membership fees pay for the upkeep ($5000 every time it's mowed, which in a tropical environment like DC is more often than you might imagine). Every grave is neatly trimmed...ancient stones are being repaired, new trees planted all the time to replace those felled by storms, draMATIC reduction in crime with the roaming dogs keeping out the crack folk and people trying to signal the prisoners in the jail next door...little flags planted by all the military graves on holidays, historic tours remembering "The Arsenal Ladies", Masons, Native American leaders, etc.

And still, people say it is 'disrespectful' to have dogs playing near dead people. I just don't get it.

Not the most rational time, though, is it? Funerals are not about the dead people. They're about what the survivors have to do to make surviving easier.

This is, of course, true.

Jilli! Nilly!

Have you seen this website?!?!?!?

[link]

I'm all ready to get my Laura on BIGTIME -- and the prices actually seem reasonable.

At the cemetery where Marni was buried (Forest Lawn? Mount Sinai?) the walk up to the chapel (not sure if that's the term to use) is lined on either side with graves either side, with gravestones flat to the ground. There were way too many (hundreds) people to fit on the walks, so people had just started spilling over in the area where we joined. A number of them looked down, read names of the deceased, and tried to find two square inches of pathway to cotch on.

I was comfortably standing on a couple of graves when I became self-conscious about not being self-conscious. But by then it was too late--the choice was to stand there, or move further out of earshot (and into the shade, which we did later--I still have my tan from that morning).

My grandmother had three or so graves in her yard. When we visited her growing up we'd play on them, or stand on them (two of them were covered with thick cement covering) to reach the fruit of the trees that overshadowed them.

We knew they were graves, and I even had known one of the cousins buried there. But they were just ten or twenty yards from her front door. No one treated them much differently from any other patches of land that weren't growing crops.

And that makes me sad, even though logically I know it *shouldn't* -- the person you've lost isn't actually lying there in the ground, but the idea of a grave sitting untended and unvisited for years on end is somehow awful.

It does me, too. I like to visit pioneer cemetaries just to say hello to all those lonely old graves, long forgotten by family and friends.

"He looks *great,* doesn't he?"

They were probably admiring his new nose.

BWAH! They probably were, at that.

Oddly enough, a friend of mine who recently lost her father suddenly *just* stopped by to catch up. One of the things she brought up was how important the open casket was to her whole family (and her dad's girlfriends, but that's another story) even though he'd been dead a week at that point (while on vacation visiting his wife, again, another story.) They were a bit concerned about how the kids, all under 7, would react, but it turned out they took it as a chance to tell their grandpa stories and one had to be restrained from sitting on pop-pop's chest (because that's what he did with his grandpa, see?)

The other stuff we talked about had a lot to do with the other stories...

the idea of a grave sitting untended and unvisited for years on end is somehow awful.

This is an important point in some volunteer work I'm doing for the Congressional Cemetery where John Phillips Souza, Hoover, and a boat load of 18th century senators are buried

I like to visit pioneer cemetaries just to say hello to all those lonely old graves, long forgotten by family and friends.

We had a Revolutionary War cemetery in the town where I grew up, and one that was simply ... old in the town where we lived in Pennsylvania. Strangely enough, Beej, people did walk their dogs there, too. But no one was really tending it -- I suppose someone did at some point, because sometimes there were flags on veterans' graves -- it was usually pretty shaggy and unkempt.

I used to love walking through there, wondering about people who had loved more than a hundred years ago, and what their lives were like them. The saddest thing is that there are always so many children's graves, sometimes in one family.

In a recent committee meeting at Congressional, we learned that a much used path is actually the "Pauper's Walk" where literally thousands of people are buried without stones. (interestingly, there are 16,000 stones-which all have to be weed whacked at each mowing, but more than 60,000 people buried in the 33 acres, with more coming still) I wonder if the people who are bugged by the dogs would be as upset that random visitors walk on innumerable graves just getting around.

AmyLiz, it turns out that we are becoming a benchmark for other facilities. A cemetery in Malaysia got in touch recently to find out how we manage our symbiotic relationship between sanctuary and doglife. As the committee gets going, I'll be writing a manual to distribute...and possibly running training sessions.