Why You Should Spend More Time in Graveyards

Unless for the express purpose of visiting a loved one’s grave, most people avoid spending time in cemeteries. They seem like gloomy, spooky, haunted places, the kind of place where, if you’ve learned anything from cinema, you’re most likely to encounter an unfriendly ghost, demon, or bogeyman. You may have only glimpsed graveyards as you’ve driven past them, perhaps holding your breath as you did, lest the spirit of one of their inhabitants slip inside your body.

But it’s worth pulling over now and again and wandering through a cemetery.

This is something we often do as a family when we’re visiting Vermont, and it always turns out to be a memorable highlight of the trip. Graveyards are surprisingly interesting places.

For one thing, they can simply be beautiful, park-like spaces (which is how Victorians used them), and the sculptures of some grave markers can be real works of art.

They also viscerally connect you with history. Surveying artifacts behind a panel of glass in a museum is one thing; realizing the bones of someone who fought in the Revolutionary War lie beneath your feet is another. While the literal ghosts of the dead don’t always make an appearance in graveyards, the ghosts of the past inevitably do. Cemeteries feel like portals to another time, one that feels both very distant and strangely close, and you pick up insights on the past and present you wouldn’t otherwise think about.

For example, wander a cemetery and note the age at death on the headstones. You’ll see some 70s and 80s, but also many for those much younger. As you pass markers that read 2, 8, 17, you rediscover just how strikingly common it was for people to die young prior to the 20th century; old cemeteries are full of the graves of infants and children. It really puts things in perspective, and makes you feel like the modern age, despite all its problems, is actually a great time to be alive.

On our last visit to a VT cemetery, we noticed a row of graves that included a woman who had lost eight children — all under the age of two — and then died herself at age 36. Her husband remarried, and then his second wife died seven years after the first, at age 28.

And cemeteries make you realize it’s simply great to be alive, period. They’re naturally the perfect places to contemplate memento mori. Especially when you encounter an inscription that once commonly adorned headstones:

Remember me as you pass by,
As you are now, so once was I,
As I am now, so you must be,
Prepare for death and follow me

In a graveyard, you recognize the inevitability of your fate, that one day, you, too, will be food for worms, and you’ll find no greater kick in the pants to carpe diem than walking around the final resting place of hundreds of corpses.

If you’ve never spent time in a cemetery, just for the sake of doing so, today we’ll lay out some ideas on how to get the most from the experience.

Graveyard Etiquette

If anything, people show too much reverence for cemeteries — feeling like they can’t be there unless they personally know someone buried on the property. But everyone is generally welcome to pay them a visit, as long as you realize you’re a guest and practice good etiquette.

Outside of municipal and national cemeteries, most cemeteries are private property. But if they aren’t fenced off or a gate is open, it’s typically fine to walk the grounds. If you’re in doubt, ask the office or owner.

Once you’re in a graveyard, keep your voice down and your children and dog under control (if the latter is even allowed); the setting may be park-like, but this is still people’s final resting place and should be surveyed with solemnity. If there’s an active burial underway, steer far clear (this is less of an issue if you visit older cemeteries, which are more interesting anyway).

Old gravestones are fragile, so don’t touch them, whether to clean dirt off a hard-to-read inscription, to make a rubbing (once popular and now often prohibited), or to prop up one that’s leaning.

Where to Look

When you enter a cemetery, you should feel free to wander at will. Just stroll the grounds and see where, well, the spirit takes you.

If you want to be a little more deliberate in looking around, consider seeking out the oldest gravestones. They’re usually found nearest the entrance or the church (if there is one), or on the highest ground. You can also spot the older sections by the material from which the gravestones are made: thin slate and weathered marble mean older, while polished granite markers are typically from after 1880 (advancements in tools toward the end of the 19th century made it easier to carve granite, which, with greater durability, was better suited to immortal markers).

You can also use findagrave.com to see an overview of who’s buried in a particular graveyard (including any famous people or ancestors). Some graves have been recorded with GPS coordinates that can direct you right to them.

Reading the Headstones

Reading the inscriptions on headstones really makes a cemetery come alive (relatively speaking), and is the most interesting thing to do while you’re there. Some are barebones: just the person’s name and date. But others include something personal about the deceased — a favorite quote of theirs or a tribute from loved ones — and these are the most poignant.

If a stone’s inscription is so weathered that you can’t quite make it out, raking light reflected from a mirror or from a flashlight across its face at a low angle can make it more legible.

In addition to reading the text on a headstone, you can also learn something by noticing what symbols are carved on it. Certain symbols were most popular in certain periods, helping you know at a glance what era the gravestone is probably from, as well as the culture of that time.

Here’s a guide to some of the most common symbols you’ll find; note that the styles reached the more western parts of the US a decade or two after they were popularized in the East.

Headstone symbolism in the colonial era, especially in New England, was colored by Puritanism, which emphasized the certainty of death and the uncertainty of salvation; showing death arriving, without saying anything about where the departed ended up, gravestones served as warnings, rather than comforts, to the living.

• Death’s head/winged skull: mortality, the soul’s flight. The Puritan default.
• Hourglass (often winged): time runs out, “time flies.”
• Scythe, coffin, crossed bones, a candle snuffed out: death and the cutting-off of life.
• Winged cherub: the soul, resurrection. Replaced the skull as theology softened in the wake of the Great Awakening.

After the Revolution, a new republic looking for inspiration for its government in ancient Greece and Rome also took its headstone symbolism from antiquity. The skull and cherub gave way to imagery like a willow bent over a Roman cremation urn, and as the Puritan influence on the culture waned, gravestone symbolism became generally less stark.

• Willow: grief, mourning, but also resurrection (willows regrow from cuttings).
• Urn: the body as a vessel the soul has left. A draped urn denoted the veil between life and death.
• Obelisk (the shape of the marker itself, not a carving): eternity. Egyptian-revival symbolism came into fashion after Napoleon’s campaigns.

During the Victorian Era, the imagery around death took a more sentimental turn. Heaven was envisioned as a place of familial reunion, and headstone symbolism became softer and more comforting.

• Clasped hands: farewell, or marriage if one cuff is lacy and the other plain.
• Hand pointing up: the soul gone to heaven.
• Hand pointing down: God reaching for the dead (not damnation).
• Lamb: typically a child’s grave.
• Broken column: a life cut short, usually a man in his prime.
• Rosebud or broken flower: a young person. The stage of bloom tracks age.
• Dove: peace, the Holy Spirit.
• Wheat sheaf: a full life, the harvest come in.

Another set of symbols that traverse a few different historical periods relates to membership in fraternal lodges. In the late 19th century, around a third of men belonged to one, and since the lodge often sold a man’s burial insurance, his order’s emblem went on his gravestone next to his name.

• Square and compasses with a G: Freemason.
• Three links of chain, F-L-T (Friendship, Love, and Truth): Odd Fellows.
• Tree-stump monument, or a seal showing a stump with axe, mallet, and wedge and the motto Dum Tacet Clamat (“though silent, he speaks”): Woodmen of the World.

Once you’re done looking at the headstones of others, you might consider what you’d want for your epitaph. Sit on a bench and reflect on the fleeting nature of life. Spending time in a cemetery is a chance to reacquaint yourself with your own mortality, as well as the fact that the present moment isn’t the only one that’s ever existed. People lived a century or two before you and experienced the same emotions. Their lives felt just as real to them as yours does to you. As you are now, so once was I . . . prepare to follow suit, and thank the ghosts of the past for the haunting nudge to seize the day.