Some buy houses for their proximity to schools, shopping, or mass transit, but I, the relentless pragmatist, was keen on walking distance to a cemetery. The Yantic Cemetery is next door to the hospital, where I'm on a first-name basis with the Emergency Department staff.
Gotta tell ya, it's weird looking out one of the hospital's 4th-floor windows and seeing a person at a grave site who looks like your primary care physician and then realizing you haven't seen your roommate since he went to the OR for tennis elbow surgery yesterday morning. A chill goes up your spine that has nothing to do with naughty nurses or those half-assed (literally) gowns.
Meanwhile, back at Yantic Cemetery, I love reading the headstones and sorting through the relationships. Two plus centuries ago, husbands often outlived their wives because so many of the latter died in childbirth. Often, the child died as well, and those graves are islands of a special sorrow.
There are many headstones of casualties from the volunteer units formed to help preserve the Union in the fight we call, inaccurately and without irony, "The Civil War." Someone, I know not who, always places small US flags on each of the sites-it's very lovely in a slightly sobering way.
There's a group of the headstones, I once counted twenty-eight, formed around a cannon that should look out of place in a cemetery but doesn't because it honors those who died at Andersonville and whose remains were repatriated.
Veterans Day is around the (calendar) corner, and there are few places more appropriate to remember ALL who served for God, Country, or because we're all young and naive still than small-town cemeteries where abstractions and statistics have names and headstones.
-bill kenny
-bill kenny
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