Ethyl remembers: The family cemetery

It's funny the things you can find in your life to be proud of, to boast about having, that make you feel special. Some people are so proud of their homes, others their cars, some their children. When I was growing up, I was proud of the fact my family had their own cemetery. If that seems a strange thing to be proud of, there was a reason.
My mother's family had been on their land for at least four generations when I came along. Down the long driveway, around the bend in the road, and up the hill from their house was the family cemetery. When Mama was growing up, her grandparents lived just down the road a bit, her aunts and uncles also had houses and home places all around. When my grandfather was a boy of ten, the family had moved from Alabama to Mississippi in a covered wagon with all their worldly possessions and their several children. Grandpa said he had walked along side the wagon and horses on the long trek to their new home, a trip that had involved several weeks and many miles. There were several acres in the original holdings and as the children grew up and established their own families, they simply divided off acreage and built homes of their own. The cemetery came about out of necessity as they lost certain family members in death.
On hot summer Sunday afternoons when I grew tired of all the heat and the front porch gossip, I would walk up the hill to the cemetery. The graves were shaded by huge oak trees that had stood a long time and grown quite massive. It was always cool and quite there and I loved to read the headstones of so many of my ancestors who had lived before me and wonder what they were like. As I think back on those visits to that little cemetery, it amazes me how much you can contemplate life in a place that is all about death. It was amazing to me how many babies had died and been laid to rest there. My mother had lost a little sister to diphtheria when she was four years old. Mama often told the story of her sudden and tragic death. She had gone to her mother, my grandmother, three days before and asked her to please cook some egg custard. Grandma had several chores that day she felt just couldn't be put off so she told her she would do it the next day. The next day the little girl started running a fever, and then the day after that she slipped into a coma and died. According to my mother, grandma grieved the rest of her life over the fact she had not cooked the custard. Those were the days before antibiotics and death came swiftly and often, especially due to early childhood diseases. It reminded me of Solomon's words in Ecclesiastes, 'don't say the former days were better than these'.
One of the tombstones that never failed to catch my attention was that of my mother's older sister. She had died on her birthday, the day she turned twenty one. The small baby that she had just given birth to was buried at her feet. She had gone to a community social event when she was fourteen, and before the night was over she ran off and got married. In the next seven years before her death she had given birth to three live children and then the small one that had caused her death. My mother said Grandpa hitched his horses to the wagon and went down to the riverbottom where she had been living, collected her pine box coffin and brought her home to their hillside to be buried. The three babies who were living, the oldest of which was six, were scattered off between different relatives to be raised.
I could read the information on her headstone and remember the story my mother had told me, but in no way could I grasp the tremendous amount of pain that must have existed in that family the day they brought her frail body home in a wooden box. Solomon was right. The generation that exist today has little knowledge of the ones that came before, and other than some information on a head stone, we could very well forget they ever existed at all.
I always felt proud of the fact I could trace my roots back to the little cemetery on the hill. After I moved to Memphis and certain funeral homes would call and try to sell me a cemetery plot, I would always proudly tell them we had our own. In a way it reminded me of the snobby Boston blue blood who used to boast to her society friends about her lineage. One day one of her friends said to her, "next you will be telling me your ancestors were on the Mayflower". "Oh my, goodness no. My people had their own boat", she said. I could proudly say my people had their own cemetery.