Photo by Ann Cady, derived from https://www.findagrave.com/cemetery/1...

This weekend I had a chance to drive through the small town where I spent most of my weekends as a kid: Hailesboro, NY. My grandmother lived there, as did one of my close friends.

Hailesboro is a working poor to working class town peppered with a few middle class houses that look like mansions compared to their surroundings. I’d like to say that nothing has changed, but it has.

Everything looks so small there. Not metaphorically. Not in the “I’ve outgrown this town through life experience” capacity. Literally, the block seems smaller. The railroad overpass seems low enough to jump up and touch from the road. The houses all look small. My grandmother’s house-front porch windows now covered with plywood-seems tiny. The willow tree we used to climb is gone. The cliff my  . . . I don’t even know what his relation to me is technically. His mother was my grandfather’s sister. Anyway, he tried to get me to jump off a cliff near the road. The rock has eroded, and the 15-20 foot drop he assured me would be fine to jump from actually seems like a pretty safe jump by today’s standards.

There was an old racetrack behind the graveyard we used to frequent as kids. Nobody drove on it by the time it became our haunt. It was just a paved track that kids walked around. Every summer my friend would drag a lawn mower up there and clear out a spot for us to camp.

The track has just about been overtaken by shrubs and grass now. Two generations and it went from a race track to a walkway to an empty field with a few patches of pavement, reminding me that what once was can never be again.

Nostalgia is the longest-lasting unrequited love, matched in its frequency and longevity only by our denial of the fact that the past is unobtainable.

The neighboring graveyard hasn’t changed much. More headstones line the dirt roads than before. The trees have grown considerably, leaving only narrow paths for vehicles. The old dead rest closest to the road, with the new dead housed in the back.

We used to walk through that graveyard at night with a little battery-operated boom box when I was in my early teens. Between us, we knew one man laid to rest there. We didn’t know him personally, but our parents grew up with him, so we remembered when he died.

The headstone was kind of our own small-town Stand by Me. We’d visit his grave every time we walked.

So of course I had to go back and say hi this weekend.

Out of all the things in that town, his gravestone was the one thing I remember that hadn’t really changed.

His name was John Shrewsberry.

He died in 1988, when I was 7.

He died when he was 31. He was younger than I am now.

Another handful of years, and he’ll have been gone longer than he was alive.

There’s something really disconcerting about all of these facts, about this unknown figure whose name was only ever attached to a headstone for me. This man has been gone since I have known of him. His stone: a monolithic signifier of death that will live on after I die. Some day his stone will have been here longer than I was alive.

This stone will outlive me.

But the meaning of that stone will have changed.

There’s something comforting about knowing that it will still be there, however. Even after ancestors forget about the plot. (It occurs to me now that I don’t know where my great grandparents are buried).

I hope that as we move forward as a species, we will abandon the practice of physical memorials on such a grand scale. I am ready to be reduced to ash. This body is a vessel. I love it, but once whatever animates me decides the vessel’s time is up, there’s no need to try to preserve what remains physically. That: embalming, placing one in a casket, that is a testament to the futility of trying to outlast death.

Stones seem so much more appropriate if you need a signifier of the permanence of death.

I’m ending this with a call to action. Whether burial is a continued practice for generations or graveyards become graveyards for a dead cultural practice, adopt a stranger’s stone. Even if you can only come back once a decade, stop by, dust it off, think about the life lived between those two dates etched thereupon. Take solace in the fact the only stable constant in life is the cyclical nature of the human condition and that maybe someone will someday curate whatever monument exists to signify your life, whether that be physical or digital.