What is (very) weird about me #2

 

As I had previously noted in my Pulitzer Award winning article (Translation: My Wife liked it and gave me a kiss),

‘What Is Weird About Me #6’, I am a Grave Walker. Part of how I catalog entries for the database, is to photograph the headstone and use it later to upload both the photo and the inscription details to an internet database (read the previously mentioned article for full details (you know you want to)).

Every now and then I photograph one that for one reason or another touches me more than any other, and I usually find it is a simple stone with little writing, but big on emotion. As I’ve said before, the stones represent the loss to the living, by the living, so each stone is a tangible, long fixed in time icon of a person’s grief and not just a marker for the departed.

Sometimes stones such as these stir me in such a way that I can’t stop thinking about the person who left this sentiment of grief behind and this thought will grab hold of me sometimes for days unless I do something about it. The way I deal with it is through writing, and when it comes to writing about the dead, it is usually a poem. From their perspective. Of the dead that is.

 

I’ve never made any secret of the fact that I am weird.

 

But this is not a fixation on the dead; it is a fixation on life. Everyone of us, with the exception of the Highlander and Fruit Cake, have numbered days in this world and going into these sacred resting places to record and even write about them, helps me to remember just that. We all become too cozy with the ‘here and now’ and often fool ourselves into believing that the inevitable is so far off, that the really important things; healing old or new wounds, extending a helping hand to someone in need, communicating with family and friends or just simply saying ‘I love you’, we think can easily be done ‘tomorrow’. That is, until that certain moment when we find it is too late.

 

I write from the perspective of the dead because they are the ones to remind us that tomorrow is never a promise.

I simply give them a voice.

 

 

The Vow

 

Be not sad that I am gone

And that our vows now part,

Do not feel you can’t go on

With now an empty heart.

 

Do not cry with a belief

That now you are alone,

Do not sit in darkened rooms

Within an empty home.

 

Remember me within your heart

And always hold me dear,

For in that place I cannot die

And will be always near.

 

For when at last our waiting ends

Forever we shall be,

Embraced within each others arms,

Never parted you, from me.