Buckner

It was a beautiful day with sunshine and a refreshing breeze.  I informed my daughters that we were going on a walk.  We set off from my parents’ house and began crunching our way down the gravel road.  In less than 10 minutes we arrived at Buckner Cemetery. 

We swung the squeaky gate wide and made our way onto the sacred ground.  It is a place of memories not recorded in history books and it is just down the road from where my parents live.  For several years my parents and a sibling or two mowed the cemetery since it was so close to their home.

 

Slowly we began moving through the haphazard stones.  Some were in a bit of a row or a grouping.  But most were just placed wherever.

Many stones are hard to read.  But if you sit and stare a while you can make out some of the details.  Sometimes all you get is a name.  Sometimes you get a whole story – one that counts the years, months, days of a person’s life. 

It doesn’t take long to see that many of these graves are markers of children.

As I move through, I read the names aloud, because when was the last time someone said their name? 

I imagine that when these babies, children and loved ones were buried, their parents and spouses and siblings felt so irreparably changed.  Their lives would never be the same.  Their stories were written in a way that they had never anticipated. 

But time moved on.  And now there is no one living who remembers the souls buried here.  No one tells their stories of life, love or loss.  All that’s left is a name with maybe some dates. 

So I read the names.  I speak it aloud on the breeze.  Because I would want someone to do that for my loved ones.

It’s always quiet here at Buckner.  Out in the country, at least a mile off the nearest black-top road, there isn’t any traffic.  The only sound is the wind moving through the trees.

I crane my head up and wonder if these trees were here back in the 1800s.  And the stones marking graves near the trees make me imagine a family picking that particular spot by that tree.  A tree that stands as sentinel, sometimes longer than the stones.

Because over there, off to the side of the cemetery, there’s a small collection of lost stones.  The graves they mark are somewhere in this place.  But no one knows where anymore.  No one is coming to visit those graves. 

This is what is left of a life.  And one day, maybe this will be what is left of my life.  I will be a name on a stone that people don’t remember.  It’s sobering to consider.  It’s sobering to stare at a stone that holds only two initials.  To see that stone and wonder if someone was so poor that they could only afford this tiny memorial. 

So we visit Buckner.  We are quiet except for reading names and dates and life spans aloud whenever we can.  And when we leave, we are mindful of our belief that this world is not our home.  We may not be able to remember the people resting here, but we will remember our time at Buckner.  And we will turn our eyes to the One who knows their names, remembers every detail of their lives, and who wrote each day they lived into His book.