Oh, You Know. Just Hanging Out in Graveyards.

Not long ago, I was driving through the hills on a sunny but cool Saturday afternoon.  I’d been to the town of my alma mater and was taking the long – the very long – way back home hoping to see something different and taking the time to think.  Just to think.

I’d been on the road for a couple of hours and was wondering just how lost I was.  It was impossible not to think of the old roads – literal and figurative – I’d been down and the one I was on now.  I consciously thought, “I’m tired.”  Tired was probably not the right word.  Wrung out, maybe.  Depleted, perhaps.  Listless, that too.  Either way, I’d just had that thought when I rounded one of many curves, only to spot a sign.

“The Chapel of Rest. Open Daily.”

Whoa.  That was unsettlingly timely.

I slowed a bit and the chapel itself came into view on the top of a hill.  It was a small whitewashed building with a green roof and a steeple peeking over an old tree.  Just the kind of church that I love – an innocent and sturdy presence that’s not worried with ostentation.

Open daily, it’d said.

I turned around and found the long dirt driveway leading to the chapel.  I was ushered in by a small yellow butterfly who was an early riser, as it seemed too early in the season for his activity.  The only car within sight, I parked and left my belongings in the car.  Visions of a horror story played in my mind – after all, this is how those stories start – but I was willing to risk it.

The building itself held impressive details, like the cold doorknob that jiggled on a squeaky-hinged door.  I peeked inside and found a yellow cast filtering through the stained glass onto 16 simple pews – 8 on each side of the aisle.  No pulpit, but instead a kneeling rail and a very aged chair for the congregation leader.  There was no heat other than the sun laying on the pews.  Above the kneeling rail, on the wall, read “Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest.”

And I sat there.  In the sun.  I just sat there.  And it did me good.

I won’t say that I had a major epiphany, but it was a good opportunity to put things into perspective.  At least from where I sat at that moment in time.  In the sun.

After a while, I noticed a graveyard visible through the opposite window.  It was an old graveyard from the looks of it.

Now, I’m not one to pass my time in graveyards.  But I am a novice historian.  Or used to be.  In college.  And I love a good story.  So I left the peace of the chapel to explore the gravestones.

I walked around, shy at first, approaching each stone carefully.  Like at a good dinner party, I soon relaxed and found myself more comfortable in the company of the stones and wanted to know more about the person each one represented.  (This should, in no way, be taken as commentary on the dinner parties I’ve attended.  I would not consider those fellow attendees to be as, ah, stony as the actual stones.  But the metaphor remains.)

There was a surprising amount of epitaphs regarding rest on the older stones – some dating to just before the Civil War, some citing the cause of death as typhus.  One monument stopped me.  At first, I couldn’t make out the words. The stone had been worn down by age and acid and the words were coming through only in lichen living in the remaining ridges.

“Thy trials ended, thy rest is won.”

Wow.  Here I was thinking that I was tired and I’m only 30, with so much left to do, so much I get to do.  Why am I tired?  This luxury of working, striving, building, is not afforded to all.  I get that.  It was reinforced a couple stones later that included, in addition to the dates of birth and death, the man’s age at death.  “33 ys. 2 ds.”

I’m an English major so I refuse to do the math down to the day, but if my own stone were to hold that age, I’d have roughly 2 and a half years from now to accomplish all that I wish to, to win my rest.  I’ve been focused on a lot this year and quite honestly sometimes I think I have over-committed.  But I’m doing it all because I want to and that’s a phenomenon that the word “luxury” doesn’t even begin to cover.

I opened the door of the Chapel expecting that the rest that it offered would be the second definition of the word according to Merriam-Webster.

rest  :  a state of motionlessness or inactivity

Instead, I left the graveyard with a sense of enthusiasm, a sense of gusto for whatever lay ahead.

#30 – Be open to the unexpected.

I was that, without meaning to be.  And it took me by surprise, wonderfully by surprise.

---

P.S. – If you’ve been waiting with bated breath for the answer to “How many potatoes does it take to kill an Irishman?” here’s the answer:

Zero.

Get it?  Isn’t that horrible?!  I’m allowed to tell that joke only because those are my people.  Or they were.  Before the famine got them.