Behold and See as You Pass By

It was sometime around my sixteenth year. I don't think my grandmother had died yet. Mom, Aunt Edie, and I had gone to the Fairdale Cemetery to put flowers on all the graves of our relatives.

I helped carry the flowers and the water jugs to the graves - most of my Mom's family is in the same area in this very small cemetery. Fairdale is another small village in north-eastern PA, and most of the families have been there since they kicked the Indians out.

In that cemetery alone, I have found my Grandmother's grandparents (born in the 1820's) . Others are buried in similar situations - cemeteries off the beaten path (on what used to be the beaten path, when cowpaths, not geology, determined roads). But the genealogy thing is new for me. When I was sixteen, I just thought cemeteries were cool.

I was a geek, even then.

The late-May Sunday afternoon was sunny, cool, and damp, as I remember it. Fairdale is never very hot, in my memory. Even in the July dog-days, Fairdale remains temperate. I was wearing jeans and a cotton sweater as I meandered away from my gossiping mother and aunt - I didn't really care how the Jones girls were doing.

There, there was a family, with four, no five, infant headstones. Could you imagine? And that one. A child, perished in the early 1800's. What a beautiful marker. After the marking of the child's name and the length of his life (to the day, as I recall), there was a brief verse. It was old and worn with acid rain, but I could still make out:

"Behold and See as You Pass By
As you are Now so Once was I
As I am Now, you soon will Be.."

But the fourth line was covered in weeds. This was the oldest part of the cemetery, and the township does a great job mowing all these little cemeteries, but you can't expect them to weed-whack every last old stone. So I stooped to pull back the weeds...

"As I am Now, you soon will Be
Prepare for Death..."

and at that point, there was a nest of something wiggly and hairy and leggy and it jumped out at me and completely freaked me out. I never saw the end of that poem. I never found that gravestone again.

Fast forward sixteen years or so. My library has a large-art fettish, or so it seems. A few years ago, they had some big ceramic dog out front. This summer, in the field next to the library, they put up a fake cemetery. It contained all sorts of re-made old stones of 18th and 19th century American Authors. (They even put up a dead tree and some dead leaves from the previous autumn.) The very first stone gave me the verse I had missed, the completion of a story that was half as old as I was...

"Prepare for Death and Follow Me"

I still think it's kinda wiggin that a marker for a 9 year old would be so morbid, but those were the times. Death was a constant companion, and children were more likely to die than live. Childbirth killed as many women as it spared. It's no wonder the settlers were so religious - if life sucks that much, you'd better hope the afterlife is better. What would be the point, otherwise?

In my own Thanksgiving prayers, I thanked God that I am alive here (as opposed to there, where I could be stoned just for walking outside without a male relative), and now (as opposed to then, where I almost certainly would have died trying to birth my first son).




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