Caustic Cupcake's Creepy Cupboard

On our second day in The Middle Of Nowhere, Ohio, my cousin asked what we'd like to do. She periodically warns us, almost apologetically, that "there ain't a whole hell of a lot to do out here." There were only a few things I wanted to do while we were there: look at Amish houses for sale, sit around talking and drinking coffee with my relatives (the sulfur-heavy well water makes surprisingly good coffee), and go see the family we have up on the hill:



The higher up the hill you go, the older the graves. Up there, the dates on a single headstone are often too close together. It's up there that I bend down and squint at faded markers, trying to find family members every time I visit. At the top of my list of reasons for wanting to move to The Middle Of Nowhere is unlimited access to graveyards.

The sweet spot for finding ancestors is having a last name that was prolific enough that you're not looking for a needle in a haystack, but unique enough that you're not overwhelmed with a million false leads to follow up on. Our Family Mystery wouldn't be such a fucking mystery, I bet, if the last name of the Mysterious Guy In Question wasn't this:



It feels like I see it in every fifth tombstone. I'm not the first person to try to track his parents down and figure out who the fuck, exactly, my great-great-grandfather was, and I don't pretend to think I'll have any more luck than everyone else before me. But I still look. And sometimes I find:



Is that one of my direct ancestors? Fuck, no. As if it would be that easy. It's one of their brothers or cousins. Either way, I guess it's just one more grave that will require flowers.

My distant cousins decorate graves. They decorate the graves their parents decorated, even when nobody can remember how we're related to the dead in question. When the flower bill began to get out of hand, one of the great aunts handed down a rule: if they have other kin who will leave flowers, don't decorate.

Grave decoration- even for the relatives we don't remember, never met, or aren't sure belong to us at all- is serious and necessary. Although logic tells me otherwise, I understand on some wordless level why we do this. When one of the great aunts put an expensive and elaborate flower arrangement on the wrong grave, she went to the store to buy another one rather than just walking over, picking it up and moving it. I understand why.

The most dutifully decorated grave is that of "the kids." The death of the two girls in the same night, I think, still stands as the family tragedy to trump all others:


I stopped by the far end of the graveyard to see some other great-great-grandparents:



Later, we went to the older cemetery. We don't have people out there- and I'd heard that before we went, but I was still holding out hope- and I fell in love with the writing on the stones and started taking pictures. A lot of them were also of the anthropomorphic shape that was once popular.



Some of them were misspelled. Check out the addition of the "h" in "daughter":



"Daughter" is misspelled here, too, on a marker for a child too young to have a name:



On a few stones, it looked like the carver ran out of room at the end of a line and had to squeeze the remaining letters into a tight spot. Also look at the tiny "N" wedged into the misspelled "months".



The last stone I took a picture of had a little of everything. It had the old anthropomorphic shape, the hand-carved letters. The carver ran out of space twice- once having to split the last name into "BOTH" and "WELL" on two lines, and again at the end of CHARLotte.



All craftsmanship aside, it struck me because it has story to it, and you could be forgiven for asking why it's a story I'd want to take a picture of. The eighteen-month old boy who died on the day after Christmas, of all days. The nearby stones of his siblings, not much older when they died. Above all, the names of the parents on the marker. On some of the old stones, the parents' names are more prominent than the children's. It's fitting that the spot should be marked with their names, too. It's their sorrow more than anyone else's, and it's part of them that's buried on that spot. The single name on an adult's gravestone is reminder of a lost life. The parents' names on a child's gravestones remind us when someone had to bear all the losing.

I don't take pictures of the unusually sad headstones for shock value, just as I don't take pictures of old, unique stones just for novelty's sake. I like them because they remind me why I hang out in graveyards. The misspellings, cracked stones and crowded letters tell me that the parents must not have been able to afford either the money or the time to start over with a new stone. That stone was fucking precious to them.

And there are old stones that are precious to me.

I walk through wide fields of stones, hundreds of stones, looking for the specific stones that were precious to my parents' parents' parents; I am looking for our story because it is my story and I don't want to die. I can- and have- become caught up in the chase for its own sake, stepping over the tiny gravestones of infants while I'm looking for the right dates or middle initials. I'm grateful for the random stone that stops me halfway up a hill, reading tragedy between the misspelled and crowded lines. It brings me back down to earth, reminds me why I started looking in the first place, shakes a little respect for life back into me.

And isn't that why I keep doing this? Because I'm afraid to die without getting my head around how precious my own life was?

We don't know who we put flowers down for sometimes, but we decorate the graves of forgotten relatives because we cry for people who cried for them. It hurts when it happens, but I don't want to keep doing this if I never get stopped by the random stone with an unusual capacity for reminding me that people cried over these graves, my chest caving in with the realization that despite the different name and date I might have just found the right grave after all as I look up from my search to see a field of hundreds. And hundreds. Of stones.