It is Hard to Feed a Dead Person

I’ve spent thousands of hours restoring headstones across Mississippi, and somewhere between the lichen, the marble, the fire ants, and the occasional snake with an attitude, I discovered something.

Outside the Bible, I don’t know of a better place to learn history.

As it turns out, I don’t know of a better place to learn about life either.

For years, I judged complete strangers.

Dead strangers.

Not by the size of their monument.

Not by the epitaph.

Not by whether they fought in a war or taught Sunday school.

I judged them by the flowers.

Fresh flowers?

“Well now… somebody sure loved them.”

No flowers?

“Bless their heart… I guess nobody comes anymore.”

Imagine that.

There I stood making up entire family histories over two faded Dollar General carnations… sitting in a granite vase my own family may have sold.

The irony is, I hated fooling with those flowers.

Every time I’d pull one out to clean a headstone, something with eight legs, six legs, or wings would come charging out of that arrangement like I’d just interrupted a family reunion.

Truth be told, I agreed with most cemetery groundskeepers.

Flowers are overrated.

Yet somehow I’d made them my measuring stick for love.

Then one day, the cemetery corrected me.

My daddy would’ve thought I’d lost my mind if I’d brought him flowers while he was alive.

He’d have preferred a Camel non-filter and a light.

What if those children moved away?

What if there weren’t any children?

What if standing in front of that headstone still hurts too much?

And then I thought about old Aunt Betty.

The one who criticized everything while she was alive.

What makes you think she wouldn’t criticize any arrangement you might bring her dead.

That doesn’t make Aunt Betty a bad person.

It just means flowers may have never been how she measured love.

Maybe that’s been my mistake all along.

Maybe we Southerners don’t really know how to love people after they’re gone.

Not because we’ve stopped loving them.

Because everything we know about loving somebody requires them to still be here.

Down here, we don’t just say, “I’m thinking about you.”

We fry chicken.

We carry casseroles.

We sit all night in hospital waiting rooms.

We pray with people, not just for them.

We show up.

That’s how Southern people love.

It’s mighty hard to feed a dead person.

So maybe flowers are simply our awkward way of saying,

“I’d still be bringing you supper if I could.”

That changed everything.

Now I don’t judge the graves with flowers.

And I don’t judge the ones without them.

Because flowers don’t measure love.

Love isn’t always a bouquet.

Sometimes it’s a son who still can’t walk through the cemetery gate.

Sometimes it’s a daughter who still reaches for the phone to call her mama.

Sometimes it’s somebody who carries a person in their heart every single day and simply can’t bear to stand in front of their name carved in stone.

I’ve learned the greatest history lessons are carved into granite.

The greatest life lessons…

are learned by the fool standing in front of it.