cemetery thoughts

{not my cemetery - not my picture}
One of my many duties in my summer job is carefully weed whacking around the headstones, and everywhere the lawnmower cannot reach in the town cemetery.
Believe it or not, I think there's probably as many people buried up here as there are living in the town. And for a town that barely even had a population of 200 that's saying something.
Every week I read headstones as I go by.
Each time I notice something different, get around to doing the math on different dates. Maybe it's just some morbid curiosity on my part, but whatever reason I do it, sometimes there's moments where you sit and think.
A boy, not far past 17, died in 1950. So much was changing, so much starting to happen, oh how much he missed.
Then there's the war babies, the people who you can tell we're the product of a soldier going off to war, same for the war marriages.
Then there's all the babies. All the little headstones, some even within my lifetime. Some all the way from the late 1800's.
Perhaps those that seem the saddest I have encountered being one for a baby boy, born in the early 1900's, barely having lived ten days. Then not even a year later, a little sister who lived but a week. And next headstone down, dying not quite a year after that, their mother.
Then there's the boy who died at 19, I realized, shuddering at the same age.
It's interesting to see how many generations of a family are up there. How longstanding in the community some of the families of kids I've grown up with are.
Though the most interesting, I would have to say, are all the pioneer graves. Graves with newer headstones only able to mark them as "Pioneer". Their names long since lost to weather and time, as records degraded and one day there was no one left to remember.

WATCHING: maleficent LISTENING: 'once upon a dream' by lana del ray