Comments by "Itinerant Patriot" (@itinerantpatriot1196) on "The fascinating history of cemeteries - Keith Eggener" video.

When I was a kid my friend and I would sometimes spend Saturday afternoons walking through cemeteries reading headstones. We made a game of it. Whoever found the oldest grave won. I remember feeling bad for the really old ones, some dating back the 1830's. I thought, here's someone nobody even remembers let alone visits. I made up my mind at that time to never be buried. I didn't want to end up as some old forgotten soul no one cared about hanging around a graveyard. But as I move closer to the end of the ride my thoughts have started to shift. My parents were both cremated and we spread their ashes at sea but now we have no place to visit them. I'm not sure who will visit me but perhaps having a little marker showing that you existed isn't such a bad thing.
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@dancingtrout6719 There were two old graveyards within a couple miles of the house I grew up in. The one with the graves from the 1830s was the oldest in the area. There was another old one a bit closer that dated back to the 1850s. That one had the most beautiful headstone I've ever seen. It was made from a tree stump about four feet high. The woman's husband carved her name into it then placed a rope around it. I don't know what sort of finish he used (some kind of lacquer) but he coated the entire stump, rope and all, and it has held up for more than a hundred years. I went back through the old neighborhood a couple years ago with a friend. We drove through that cemetery and the marker is still there, a beautiful tribute from a husband to a wife who was dearly loved and died young (she was in her early 30s when she passed). I should have taken a picture of it, being that is so unique but it didn't dawn on me to do so. Like I say, I always felt sad for the people who passed and are eventually forgotten as time marches on. They haven't buried anyone in either cemetery for a long time. Old monuments to another era.
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