Cemeteries. I like cemeteries.

Often, when I find myself in a cemetery – be it large or just a family site – I experience a sense of peace, a feeling that we are all, indeed, brothers and sisters.

Of course, there is, often, a sense of sadness, too. A palpable presence of absence. A bittersweet emotion.

A cemetery is a place of remembrance. For remembrance. And, as such, I often do feel as if I am “standing on holy ground.”

Local resident Johanna Huber wrote an evocative piece, titled “Old Cemeteries,” back in 2003 for a journal class. Space limitations don’t allow for the entire poem, but here’s just a bit:

“Angels weeping silently under willow trees/ Lambs caring for their charges/ Tiny tombstones in vast numbers remind us of mothers’ losses/ Fathers mourned by their sons/ Yellow fever victims by the thousands/ We learn much of the past.”

And this: “Rusting garlands clinging to obelisks/ Standing like soldiers at attention/ Guarding the granite vault of Colonel Bliss soon to move to a better place under the knowing hand of my husband.”

Johanna wrote me that, “Leonard (her husband) grew up in the cemetery business. I just grew up in cemeteries.”

She also sent me a poem, author unknown, that begins, “Dear Ancestor, Your tombstone stands among the rest; Neglected and alone. The name and date are chiseled out on polished, marble stone. It reaches out to all who care. It is too late to mourn. You did not know that I exist. You died and I was born. Yet each of us are cells of you in flesh, in blood, in bone. Our blood contracts and beats a pulse entirely not our own.

“Dear Ancestor, the place you filled one hundred years ago spreads out among the ones you left who would have loved you so. I wonder if you lived and loved. I wonder if you knew that someday I would find this spot and come to visit you.”

Cemeteries. I like cemeteries.

APROPOS — “A cemetery is a history of people — a perpetual record of yesterday and a sanctuary of peace and quiet today. A cemetery exists because every life is worth loving and remembering — always.”

— Unknown