Cemeteries

Tuesday, June 24, 2025

Solemnity of the Nativity of Saint John the Baptist

(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)

Cemeteries

You have searched me, O Lord, and you know me. You know when I sit and when I rise. You perceive my thoughts from afar. You discern my going out and my lying down; you are familiar with all my ways.

In a week or so we will get some flowers from Dollar Tree and take them to put on Mom and Dad’s Mt. Pulaski grave. We’ll also get some flowers for Grandma and Grandpa Sandel’s gravesite, in the same cemetery. I hope we can find plots O-6-5 and L-16-1 with the pictures posted on the Find a Grave website. And there are also the sites for George and his wife Frances Sandel.

In just a few minutes I found several generations of Sandel ancestors.

John, Mary Kay and I (1949) … from Roland (1922) … from William (1897) … from George (1871) … from Michael (1828) … from Heinrich or Johann (1799) …

There are Sandels in Baden-Wűrttemberg, a town just southeast of Stuttgart back at least till 1728, when Abraham Sandel was born. Michael, born in 1828, came to America sometime after his son George was born in 1871. They settled in Logan County, where many of them stayed put. My brother John, born in 1956, has lived there all his life.

Where can I go from your spirit? Where can I flee from your presence? If I go up to the heavens, you are there; if I make my bed in the depths, you are there. If I rise on the wings of the dawn, if I settle on the far side of the sea, even there your hand will guide me, your right hand will hold me fast.

Until I looked at this genealogy, simple to tracee because of gravesite records, I hadn’t thought seriously about making our names easy to find in this historical tree. But now I guess I’d like to renew the search for a site at Mt. Pulaski Cemetery for a fourth generation of Sandels. It is a beautiful green field, covered with stones, with room for at least one more.

You created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place, when I was woven together in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed body; all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.

We saw Cemetery Club at the Epilogue Theater in Indianapolis this weekend. Three Jewish widows and a widower spend one day a month visiting their spouses at the New York City cemetery where they’ve been buried. They complain to each other about the upkeep and the bills that go up every year. Their outrageous Jewish accents precede them to the cemetery, to a wedding, through their pranks and their fights and eventually to a death, courtship and conclusion. As far as the play goes, Ida, Lucille and Doris spend all their time in a living room and at a Jewish cemetery.

Grounded

Sitting in the shade of a cemetery tree,

the breeze blows my hair on a warm summer afternoon,

a solitary cloud in the sky.

It feels safer to be away from the living

and comforting to be in the welcome of many.

Peace is here indeed…

in the nature,

in those buried,

in myself…

all grounded in the Divine. – Clarence Heller

Remembering and writing about Dad (and I have another story or two), I feel closer not just to him and the rest of my family, but also safer in the presence of eventual death. Whatever sting there was isn’t threatening to me right now. It’s not so weird or scary to imagine a cemetery plot, where I either rest my former body or go to visit Margaret’s.

Leah and Margaret talked on Sunday about joining the “cute old peoples’ club.” At the Indianapolis Art Museum yesterday my phone died, and Margaret offered me her phone to take more photos of the incredible art. Then I promptly lost her. No way we could call each other. Margaret asked Willie, a sweet 72 year old retired musician from Harlem turned “guard” at the museum, to help her find me. He loved helping us, and it gave him something to do. After 30 or 40 minutes we reappeared to each other. Two cute old people, lost … and found. And there was joy in heaven!

Lost kids – well you know, the help desk works hard to get them back with their folks. But a retired couple from Texas? We just thank God that he sent Willie.

We won’t lose each other in the cemetery, right? Like in that last act of Our Town, where the dead neighbors talk away up there on the hill – nobody is lost up there. They’ve been found, and they stay found. Sounds good to me. Much better than my recurring dream of losing someone or something (usually my phone). I wake up in a panic and realize it’s “just a dream.” Yesterday it felt much more real.

When I awake, I am still with you. If only, God, you would slay the wicked! Away from me, you bloodthirsty men! Search me, O God, and know my heart. Test me and know my anxious thoughts. See if there is any offensive way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting.

O  thank you Lord, for sending Willie. We found each other before he found me, but just like an angel he hovered over us and guided us down the path. You, Lord, are our hiding place – within the folds of your wings, we are found.

(Isaiah 39, Psalm 139, Acts 13, Luke 1_)

(posted at davesandel.net)

#