“It looks so peaceful,” wife Beverly remarked one cloudy afternoon this week when we trundled from the end of a lane leading into Humboldt’s Mount Hope Cemetery.
A few minutes earlier Beverly asked to take a drive, she having been self-quarantined in the house for several days. My usual inclination for an outing is to head to the river. Humboldt doesn’t have many scenic drives, and the frothing waters of the Neosho are about as picturesque as it gets on short notice.
As we drove deeper into the 40-acre cemetery we reasoned it was a good time to take a look at our future resting places. Along about the time my granddad, Sherman Oliphant, died in 1964 the family purchased eight lots; four are occupied by my parents and grandparents. The lots are on the north side, just south of a huge quarry turned private lake that once supplied raw material for Humboldt Brick and Tile. Perhaps that has existential meaning. My granddad worked at the brick plant during the Great Depression. His wages were meager, less than a dollar a day, but enough to keep our dignity.
“We need to look into a headstone,” Beverly said. She’s right, although it’s something I purposely have postponed.
Our plots are on a high point, with a commanding view of the more than 5,000 interred, as well as a multitude of deciduous and coniferous trees — some stately, others gnarled and disfigured from the elements.
A drive through any cemetery piques the imagination.
Mount Hope has graves that date to the 1800s and a number of eye-catching markers that frequently relate to familial idiosyncrasies. One has a stone replica of a dog standing guard at his master’s headstone. Another is framed with stone carved to look like logs.
Many are fashioned from granite, or whatever passes for that igneous rock. Some older ones are made of limestone, it being in abundance hereabouts and the single thing that spawned Monarch more than a century ago. Those made of softer stone dating from long ago have worn to where it is difficult to read the inscriptions.
We saw stones that looked like the Leaning Tower of Pisa. A few have toppled over altogether.
I know their care is the family’s responsibility, but in many cases no surviving members are around to right them or shore up those tilting.
The alternative, albeit perhaps an expensive one, would be for an organization or self-appointed group to come to the rescue. I’d be delighted to help out.
