Memento Mori

In the Old Burial Ground in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, the most famous residents are outshined by the gravestone of someone who isn’t dead yet.

My visit was to pay my respects at the grave of the author Willa Cather, whose work I admire. Her grave is easy to find, in the lowest corner of the burial ground, facing Mount Monadnock in the distance. I greatly enjoyed O Pioneers!, My Antonia, and Death Comes for the Archbishop, which I read in my adulthood, on a friend’s recommendation. I recently picked up the Library of America collection, so I can read her less famous novels, including One of Ours, about a young man shipped off to die in the Great War.

Not that Cather’s grave was underwhelming, but after making the trip, we decided to explore the entire grounds to see what we could see. We were not disappointed.

Town Tomb, Dorothy Caldwell tomb, Sarah Averill "done all she could."

The Town Tomb has the air of a barrow mound. Bodies were interred here in the winter months when digging graves in the frozen earth was difficult or impossible. The face of Dorothy Caldwell stares down from the tomb that her husband, the sculptor Count Viggo Brandt-Erichson, built for her and their infant daughter. Every graveyard needs at least one snarky inscription, and here Sarah Averill’s fits the bill. “She done all she could.”

The many slate tombstones are beautiful, and many of them were still legible after centuries. The stones with engravings that faced north, the side that lichen favors due to coolness and moisture, fared the worst. Lichens are a symbiote, algae and fungi living together to produce weak acids which dissolve rock and absorb the resulting minerals. They turned the tombstones leopard-spotted with their stony green patches. The stunning stones are still being made, many with memento mori, words or images that remind the living of their fate.

“My (sand)glass is run, and so must yours.”

Memento mori is Latin for “Remember you must die.” Seems rather like gilding the lily, in my opinion. We’re in a graveyard; unless we’re callow youth, we’re likely considering our own mortality. Humans believe that we are the only living creature who knows we must die; but we tend to think very highly of ourselves. Some people consider their mortality early. We encountered the future grave of one such fellow, who had a wonderful tombstone engraved in anticipation of it marking the site of his eternal dirt nap.

The future grave of Robert Bigelow Stephenson.

After some web searching, I found his website. He is a student of Jaffrey history, and as the back of his stone suggests, an visitor of Antartica. You can learn about both at the website, which includes photos that will assure you that he is very much alive as of this writing. His winged visage stares from the tombstone, facing Mount Monadnock, dauntless in the face of impending lichen.

Amtheyst family marker, and Mrs Lucy's lovely stone.

Not everyone chose slate; one family marker is a chunk of amethyst, also covered in lichen. Perhaps we should add a memento mori for the stones themselves, they they remember that even rock must die. I’ll leave you with a delightful and morbid song by The Decemberists to play while visiting these places…