Living Among Headstones: Life in a Country Cemetery

by Shannon Applegate

When Shannon Applegate inherited a five-acre cemetery in western Oregon, she began to record the history and daily life of this overgrown community graveyard. Living among Headstones is more than a memoir — it's an expansive look at how death is treated throughout the centuries and a meditation on how we long for our loved ones to have a continuing place in our world.

List Price:  $24.95

Product Details

• Hardcover: 312 pages
• Publisher: Thunder's Mouth Press (May 10, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN: 156025677X

Book Description

A few years ago, Shannon Applegate was bequeathed a small cemetery in western Oregon. The neglected five acres were not only the burial site for generations of her family and friends but the designated resting ground for many in the nearby, down-on-its-luck logging town. Living Among Headstones chronicles the author's experiences as she takes charge of this sacred land and finds herself plotting graves, consoling families, and confronting the funeral industry as she examines the universal question of why the living care so much about the earthly setting in which the dead are laid to rest.

Filled with humor, singular events, pathos, original illustrations, and unexpected smiles, this book offers historical asides and moving personal stories. For example, Shannon explores the language and customs of funerals as she agonizes over how to approach families who have covered graves with plastic flowers and inappropriate ornaments. In doing so, she contemplates the myriad ways cultures past and present approach the dead. In part, this is a book about rural cemeteries in contemporary America, but the sum is a meditation on how we long for those we love to have a continuing place in our world, focusing as much on life as death.

Excerpt

What if I had a child who died, and all my resources had been sucked into a sinkhole of hospital expenses? What if I didn't have the two or three hundred dollars it costs these days to buy an average-sized headstone? As I examine this grave, with its glow-in-the-dark rubber snakes, and its sealed package of rub-on tattoos of a cross and crown (the only "religious" symbols I see here) I can't escape the sense that something fundamental has changed in the manner in which many of us mourn our dead.

Our traditional ceremonies, especially our funerals, have failed us; Bible verses and platitudes spoken by some member of the clergy who may not have met the person we are grieving just doesn't cut it anymore. Hence, the tendency these days for memorial services with an informal feeling, rather than the somber funerals where the dead are enshrined before us in expensive caskets....

Lately I have been to several Celebrations of Life, where participation is appreciated and even expected. Get up and show your grief. Get up and tell us something about the dead that can make us cry or cheer us up. It is a memorial, and we want our memories tugged.