- William Shakespeare

My young niece visited recently, noting with revulsion my collection of cemetery photographs. She gasped as she pointed to a hundred-year-old tombstone blemished with rust-colored lichen. “Is that blood?” she asked, worried. I assured her that indeed there is not, despite all the horror flicks of Hollywood, a drop of blood to be found at cemeteries.

I know this because I grew up in a cemetery. Not within its boundaries of course, but near enough it perimeter to claim it as a backyard. It may be that synergy of location coupled with genetic disposition drew me to spend hours, indeed whole summer afternoons, among the tombstones of that rural Minnesota burial ground.

I lived directly across a river from the five-acre forest of stones aptly named Forest Hill. This childhood benchmark impressed my young psyche to such extent that I found myself, once of age, a dyed-in-the-wool taphophile- a lover of tombstones, cemeteries, and funerals.

That field of tombstones, in innumerable sizes and shapes, poised atop the hillside as my birthright backdrop. I canvassed those grounds, examining the life stories etched upon each stone. While studying the epitaphs, I discovered life, not death, dotted the steep slope. I closely examined the carvings, symbolic motifs, personal annotations. I mused over markers, marveled at the artistry of stonecutters, meditated upon etched confidences. A virtual store of stones- stories read as messages memorializing a life. From my bedroom window I watched as fresh graves were dug and gravesite canopies erected, signaling an impending burial, a conclusion to another story. The funeral procession followed: a hearse in motion circling the loop of winding lane leading to an open grave, and a closed book. Familiar scenes of mortality that effectively formed the foundational framework of my early life.

The bones of my own family lay interred in eternal rest beneath that forest ground. I bowed as mourner on many occasions, bidding farewell, although I will no doubt be the first of a successive four generations not to be buried among the kindred dust of Forest Hill. My grandfather, like his parents before him, was laid there to rest. Likewise, handfuls of Forest Hill's soil, in essence the very ashes of my ancestors, were cast on my father's casket as his life story concluded.

I, too, learned to hear sermons in every stone, albeit gravestones. Lessons of my primary days schooled me in perspective, priorities, and principles. Funerary imprints molded the person and genealogist that I am today. I learned early on that life is a ledger of hours loaned temporarily into possession. A distinctive story is penned between those two dates that every mortal records. It is literally a once-in-a-lifetime story, unique to each person. Every dawn turns another page in the daybook of individual lives. Once complete, the tome locks closed to join the library of ages. Yet from far gathering dust, its sepulchral tones ring across the chasm separating life and death.

In an effort to allay my niece's fears, I wanted to share my feelings of how natural, yet sad, death is. I wanted to explain that while it ends a story, the energy and echo of a life's voice reverberate into the future. Wistfully, I wanted to transport her back in time to trace the long-ago footsteps of another girl, me, ears attentive to stones and stories, rambling a western hillside in the waning light of a summer's day. I wished to take her to the place where this taphophile grew up and learned to commune among cemeteries and spirits of departed ancestors elsewhere.