Clinging to the Cross
While walking through a cemetery, I was shocked to see a very familiar statue.
It was late April, and I was standing in a cemetery in Waterbury, Connecticut. A few yards away, my husband and his sister were catching up with some cousins they hadn’t seen in years. In town for a family birthday party, we also took the opportunity to visit my mother-in-law’s grave for the first time. She had died the previous December, but a heavy snowstorm the day of the funeral had prevented a graveside service. Oddly, or maybe not, I didn’t have a real sense of closure until I saw her name on the family headstone that day, 5 months later.
While the others chatted about family memories and compared notes on their lives in the intervening years, I walked through the lines of headstones, reading the inscriptions and doing the “dash math” to determine ages. I don’t know why I do this, but I can’t not do it when walking through cemeteries. And, weird or not, I actually am drawn to cemeteries—not in a morbid or death-obsessed way, but rather because of my fascination with “people stories.”
Cemeteries, to me, don’t represent death so much as they honor life. They are filled with people stories. You just have to look for them.
A trend in modern headstones makes it easier to learn about the people they honor, because more text, graphics, and even photographs can be etched into the stones. And so we learn someone’s favorite quote, read lyrics from a favorite song, or see photos of them, sometimes posing with loved ones or a cherished pet.
Older headstones, though, require us to fill in the blanks surrounding the minimal information carved into stone: name, date of birth, date of death; sometimes a short quote, but usually not. So when I walk through cemeteries, reading the names and doing the math, I look for clues about peoples’ lives. Something more meaningful, more personal, than two dates that mark the boundaries of a life but say nothing about how it was lived.
Sometimes family plots tell fairly complete stories. A man who died at 46, while his wife lived to be 85. A couple who died mere weeks apart, in their 70s. A woman buried with her three children, one of whom died as an infant just 2 years before her own death; I pause there and wonder if the heartbreak of losing a child, or the stress of raising a family during the Great Depression, contributed to her death. I also wonder why her husband isn’t buried in the same plot, but the markers yield no clues to that question.
The Waterbury cemetery had a lot of headstones shaped like crosses. I know it’s not unusual to see crosses in cemeteries; one of the most poignant scenes you can ever experience is the endless rows of white crosses at Arlington National Cemetery But I had never before seen so many varieties. There were Celtic crosses and Byzantine crosses, nail crosses, Methodist crosses, Catholic crucifixes, and many more. Some were rather ornate, with etched or sculpted flowers or geometric patterns. Others were just two straight, wide lines intersecting at right angles to form that universally recognized, simple shape which has launched complex, philosophical discussions for many centuries.
As I started walking back toward the group, my eye was drawn to an extra-large cross that was really more of a monument than a headstone. I first noticed it from a back view; it looked like a simple cross on top of some rocks, or maybe a cliff. As I drew nearer and walked around it to see the front, I was startled to see the figure of a woman. She had not been visible from the other angle, and thus my surprise came out as a gasp and a jump backwards to avoid walking straight into what I thought for a split second was a real person.
After catching my breath and laughing at myself, I looked carefully at the lifesized statue. The woman had her arms wrapped around the cross, as if she were hanging onto it to avoid falling down. She was looking upward, toward an inscription near the top of the cross, which said:
Simply to thy cross I cling.
It was a powerful moment. The statue was a perfect illustration of how I have felt many hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of times in my life. When the world drops out from under me, or life’s maelstroms swirl around me, I actually picture myself doing exactly what the woman on the statue was doing: turning to the one steady, unwavering source of comfort and promise and love and grace and mercy that will always be there. It was as though someone 50 years earlier had seen the picture in my mind and commissioned a statue of it.
I knelt down to take a photograph. And as I knelt, the mid-afternoon sun came into my field of vision, from behind the cross, its rays touching both the sculpted woman and myself. It was a “God-chill” moment of enormous proportions — one I will remember always.
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The caption for this photo is: Clinging to the bridge between / hopelessness and hope unseen. This was not engraved on the statue. I wrote it to represent what the cross symbolizes to me. It’s based on Hebrews 1:11:
Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.
