3 posts tagged “death”

It is the duty of the living to honor the memories of those that go before us.

There is a very nice piece on Howard on CMU's alumni site.

My grandfather died this morning, around 4am ET. I got the call from my parents at 1:30am my time, and slept poorly after that.
My mother is shaken up but not inconsolable. She knows too that this is a relief for everyone involved. She also has the burial arrangements to concentrate upon. It turns out that my maternal grandparents had a five plots in a premium New Jersey cemetery, right outside of the Empire City. They bought the plots for around $360 US in 1934, and only two have been used so far. Well, three actually, as the cemetery folk managed to bury another James Thompson in the plot reserved for my grandfather. My parents buried my grandmother in a plot in North Carolina, before taking over my grandfather's affairs and discovering the existence of these plots. So to complete the burial process, they will have to disinter my grandmother, ship her to New Jersey, and bury her with my grandfather, and have the other James Thompson removed. Also, the cemetery has established a practice of double-burying people where they can to save on space, since there is no new land in New Jersey for graveyards, which means that my parents may now have a place to be buried. From what my mother said they haven't considered it much, and I told them if it was left purely up to me I'd have them pressed into synthetic diamonds.

Born Under A Bad SIgn

Jimi Hendrix

RIP James Robert Thompson 1921-2007
Husband, Father, Teacher, Historian

Interesting thing about my new home. Phoenix has, since 1925, held an annual memorial for city employees who dies while on duty. There is a wall with glass bricks, each etched with the names of the honored fallen, and the mayor holds a ceremony on Feb 12th every year.
This year, today, they held the ceremony, even though not one city employee died while on duty this past year.

Death is something of a foreign concept for me. I've lost few friends or family over the years, and only two that were at all close to me. To honor the dead is even more strange to me, but I've always recognized the need for others to offer memorial to the departed. I still haven't reconciled my own beliefs with those of the general public, but I do  understand and support public memorials, especially for veterans.