Ghost Dogs

Journeying through Cemeteries

We don’t often like to talk about death. Let me rephrase that. We don’t know how to talk about death. I think we fear it for obvious reasons, but when you lose someone or many “someones” to death, some of the fear of our own mortality goes away. As the Ancient Stoics say, “momento mori,” meaning, “we are all going to die.”

I’ve said on more than one occasion that dying is just a doorway we walk through. I’ve seen human babies be born, and I’ve helped usher out human adults as they exited stage left into the great unknown. The resemblance is striking. It’s like a revolving door with some entering life and some exiting.

Maybe my acceptance of momento mori is why I love cemeteries. I always have. I think the first one I ever visited was in Chattanooga. My sister is buried there. So is my uncle Jack, the handsome merchant marine who was my father’s younger brother who died in 1945. I never met Jack, but I knew him from the stories my father and my grandmother told me. My grandmother is buried in that same cemetery in Tennessee.

I’ve walked cemeteries from Milan and London to Cowan, Tennessee and Oakland, California. I love how every culture treats them a little differently. In Southern California where I live, we tend to hide our graves. On the East Coast of the United States and in some of the Southern states, cemeteries are often in plain sight along roads and highways, in back of churches, and even on private property where old graves of entire families remain in the backyard of newer homes.

On New Years Day this year a drive to clear my head took me past a cemetery not far from my home. I’ve passed it many times but never stopped. This time, I made a U-turn and pulled into Singing Hills Memorial Park. I noticed other people meandering about the grounds, and a group of people with lawn chairs in a circle around a set of graves. They seemed to be spending time together. I parked and started walking the grounds, first the circumference, then I ventured across the grass to the graves.

In the distance I saw two shepherd-mix dogs who were also walking among the graves. They seemed to be having a wonderful time, and I wondered if it was breaking some rule to have them there. It didn’t matter to me. I actually loved that they were enjoying the beautiful day and the green grass. So, when one of them made eye contact, I smiled to which that large male responded with a dopey canter toward me. I glanced over at the family gathering, hoping that if the dogs turned out not to be friendly, someone would rescue me. That didn’t turn out to be necessary.

Before long the second dog joined us as we walked through the graves. From time to time they would sidle up to me when I stopped to look at a particular headstone, and I’d give them pets on the head and tell them they were “good boys,” words they obviously knew as they both wagged their tails, looking up at me in that way that we dog lovers recognize as a smile.

I felt at peace in that cemetery. I loved the big rock formations on all the surrounding mountains, and thought that they were the true headstones, instead of the mostly flat markers of most of the graves in Singing Hills. I read each inscription I passed. Some had ceramic memorial photos of the deceased. The people in those photos looked like they were the happiest they had ever been. Some were with husbands or wives. Some were all by themselves, their image forever captured in that one brief moment and the click of a camera.

I walked to my car and just before I got in, I turned back for one more look and there they were, my two canine companions in the distance, glancing up for a second before turning to sniff the ground and walk off in the opposite direction. I wondered if they were even real. Were they just ghost hounds who joined me for a moment, constant companions to the bodies underground? That idea made me smile.

Our world is so beautiful, and yet so complex. My heart breaks at least a half dozen times a day when I see humans hurting humans. People are afraid. Babies are dying in the cold. Mothers are getting shot after dropping their children off at school. It’s understandable to feel hopeless.

So, I walk among gravesides and make friends with any beings I encounter along the way. Canine or other worldly. Nothing to do but be present and remember. Momento Mori.