As Long As Someone Remembers
Stories keep people alive long after memory alone would have failed.
- By Dennis Easters
As I rounded the first curve into downtown Atenas, the morning sun caught the white tile tombs of the municipal cemetery.
Perched slightly above street level and occupying an entire city block, the cemetery’s white walls were lined with flowering planters.
An elderly woman, broom in hand, was carefully scrubbing a tombstone. Beside her sat a fresh pot of flowers waiting to be arranged.
I couldn’t help but smile.
Suddenly, I was eight years old again.
It was a warm Saturday morning at the beginning of summer. Cars and pickup trucks slowly pulled into the dirt drive of Fellowship Primitive Baptist Church Cemetery.
Today was cemetery work day, something that, as I recall, happened several times each year.
Family members arrived carrying chainsaws and lawnmowers. Others unloaded rakes, hoes, shovels, and wheelbarrows. Nearly everyone brought fresh flowers that would grace the family plots at the end of the day.
As Daddy unloaded the lawnmower, Nana grabbed the hoe and rake.
Pointing across the cemetery, near the back fence, she said, “Everyone’s over there around Mama and Daddy. I’ll hoe the weeds, and you can rake them up, Dennis.”
Stories keep people alive long after memory alone would have failed. I knew them intimately through family stories. "I still remember...those graves from the 1700s, 1800s, and 1900s, ones I never met, but knew intimately through family stories."
There was something almost festive about the day.
Everyone had a purpose.
“Annie! It’s been a month of Sundays. How do you do?”
“It certainly has. I’m doing fine, Lillian. And you?”
“We’ve got a good turnout today.”
As we cleaned around the graves, Daddy made his way over the entire section where our family was buried, mowing around each headstone with care. Several of the other men were doing the same.
Off in the distance, a chainsaw made quick work of an old cedar tree that had fallen across several graves.
Wheelbarrows piled high with weeds and limbs made their way toward the far corner of the cemetery, where everything would eventually be burned. Old, artificial flowers were gathered into a large barrel behind the church.
A few minutes before noon, the ladies drifted toward the pavilion, which had been standing there since the late 1800s.
Everyone had brought a covered dish from home.
It was dinner on the grounds.
Fresh fried chicken.
The last of the season’s mustard greens.
The first black-eyed peas and sweet corn of summer.
Chicken and dumplings.
Candied yams.
A large pot of swamp cabbage.
Guava cobbler.
Pound cake topped with fresh strawberries.
Banana pudding.
And because Nana knew exactly what I hoped for every year, a chocolate cookie sheet cake, one of her desserts that everyone clamored for.
Everything was washed down with enough sweet tea to satisfy a Baptist congregation.
Over lunch, everyone reminisced about the old days.
Those who had passed became part of the conversation.
They took a seat at the table and joined the meal.
Someone mentioned that Grandma and Grandpa Stanaland had been founding members of both the church and cemetery back in 1875.
Nana told stories about taking our cousins from “town” into the cemetery after dark. Years earlier, families had fenced each grave with a low wire stretched between short corner posts. The unsuspecting cousins would inevitably trip over the wire and stumble forward.
Everyone else would groan dramatically, pretending the dead had felt the disturbance. Our uptown cousins nearly jumped out of their skin.
Just beyond the pavilion stood the remains of an old double-seater outhouse.
“Tommy,” someone asked, “do you remember when Twila and Vila went in there together?”
The girls had closed the door and were about to sit down when a deep voice came from the darkness.
“Come on in, girls…I won’t bother you.”
“They about messed their pants!”
Everyone erupted in laughter.
After lunch, people quietly returned to the graves, arranging fresh flowers just so, taking a few moments to stand in silence before heading home.
As we drove away, I looked back through the rear window at the neatly cleaned cemetery.
Even though I’d never met most of those buried there, I somehow felt as though I knew them.
Not through history books.
Some I had discovered in faded old photographs.
But for the most part, I knew them through stories.
Of course, cemetery clean-up day wasn’t the only time we visited family.
Several times each year Mama, Granny, and Grandma Murphy would load fresh flowers into the car, and we’d make our rounds to the family graves at Providence Cemetery.
As a young boy, I remember saying that dead people scared me.
Grandma Murphy overheard me.
Without looking up, she simply smiled and said,
“Honey…it’s not the dead ones you need to be scared of.”
A few weeks later, my parents were watching the evening news when the story broke about Adam Walsh, a little boy about my own age who had disappeared from a shopping mall in Miami.
It was then I began to understand what she meant.
Years later, Gerardo and I traveled to Oaxaca, Mexico, during Día de los Muertos.
It had been on my bucket list for as long as I could remember.
For days, the entire city felt like one great celebration.
Parades wound through the streets.
Altars filled with candles, flowers, photographs, and incense appeared on nearly every corner.
The highlight, however, came after dark, when we visited the campos santos—the sacred grounds, as the locals called their cemeteries.
As midnight approached, we entered the first one.
Music drifted through the air.
The scent of incense lingered beneath the trees.
The entire cemetery glowed with candlelight.
Families gathered around the graves of their loved ones, having spent hours cleaning, arranging flowers, lighting candles, and preparing food and drink to share with those who crossed the bridge to the other side.
Aunt Margaret at her 80th birthday celebration at Fellowship Primitive Baptist Church’s old pavilion, a place filled with decades of family gatherings and shared memories.
Mariachis wandered from grave to grave taking requests.
Songs were sung.
Toasts were offered.
Stories were told.
A few graves, however, were dark.
No candles.
No flowers.
No music.
No one remained to remember.
I found those the hardest to look at.
I had gone expecting to witness a tradition unlike my own.
Instead, I found something surprisingly familiar.
On my last day in Riverview before returning to Costa Rica, I always drive to Plant City to pick up flowers for the graves.
Even though part of me wants to buy fresh flowers, I choose good-quality silk flowers because, as Granny always said, “They’ll hold up better than fresh.”
As I pull into the cemetery, I’ve already plotted my rounds.
Grandma Murphy first.
I arrange the lavender lilacs—lavender, her favorite color—in the granite urn that straddles her and Grandaddy’s grave.
“I sure miss your hoe cake and guava cobbler, Grandma.”
I look to my left and pull a few weeds from around Aunt Ida and Uncle Lee’s marker.
“Aunt Idy,” I say—because I couldn’t pronounce Ida as a child—”are you still keeping everyone in line?”
The rest of the Murphy clan, some fifteen of them, surround us.
Granny rests on the other side of the dirt road.
I walk over and say hello, telling her about the jack-ass who cut me off on the drive over and how it “made my ass want a sip of ice water”—still my favorite Granny-ism.
I begin to laugh.
And I hear her laugh with me.
I stop by Aunt Thelma’s grave before making my way to Grandma and Grandpa York.
“I miss your stories,” I tell her, “and our long conversations about the old days. I miss hearing you tell me about box suppers and candy pullings. I still have those family photographs and quilt tops you gave me.”
Grandma and Grandpa York’s large marble slabs are covered with black mold, overdue for a good scrubbing.
“Next time,” I tell them, “I’ll scrub you clean.”
With every visit, there seem to be fewer flowers than before.
More graves standing quietly on their own.
More tombstones weathered, damaged, or forgotten.
I understand that life moves forward.
We all move forward.
Children scatter.
Families grow smaller.
Traditions quietly fade.
As I climb back into the truck, I can’t help but think:
One day these flowers will no longer be mine to place.
Someone else will decide whether the tradition continues…
or whether it quietly ends with me.
To those who remain, many of these people will simply become names on stone.
Strangers.
Unknown.
I cannot help wondering what is lost when no one remembers to stop.
Perhaps honoring the dead was never really about them.
Rather, it was always about teaching the living where they came from.
An elderly woman keeps vigil beside the grave of someone she still remembers. Long after the world has moved on, love returns in flowers, candlelight, and quiet presence.