A Different Type of Peace

On Remembrance and Grief

Our friendship is a slow river that courses down past mossy banks and smooth stones on its way to nowhere in particular. The best friends I have are the one who I say “forgive me” and Amy does just that: she forgives me my absence.

It’s been hard to get together. It’s a mix of missed connections for one reason or another but three years have passed swiftly. This time, we opted out of the Manhattan buzz and, instead, Amy took me time traveling in a cemetery.

ID: Broken headstone with faded writing

Headstones dotted grassy knolls on a breezy Monday afternoon. It was far from spooky or morose, but peaceful. My friend’s face lit up as she panned an outstretched hand over the landscape, pointing toward the sections she’d been to and what she wished to find. Amy had been fulfilling requests for Find A Grave1 during the course of studying genealogy and found the work rewarding. Over time, she’d gotten to know a lot about cemeteries, their layouts, and history. But there was more to discover each time, more to learn about those buried, and the people who tended the land.

We strolled past whole families, marked simply by initials, epitaphs, or weather worn slabs with pebbled surfaces, the interred’s names gone forever. There were all shapes and sizes of headstones with styles typical of a time period or one that was styled after…