Finding quiet sanctuary on a November afternoon

By Mary Kay Roth

Winds generally blow harsh atop this lonely hill, just outside of Otoe, Nebraska. But breezes seem gentler today, a whisper of breath on a November afternoon sending dry leaves skittering across graves where tombstones manage to capture them.  

Some headstones here are new and polished, glistening under the honey autumn sunshine, casting long shadows upon barren, freshly tilled dirt. Other grave markers look almost ancient, their neglected marble faces chipped and worn, their etchings grown indecipherable.   

This is my favorite time to come to the rural Otoe cemetery, a solo visit I make each year when the weather turns chill, a moment I like to think I tuck my loved ones into bed for winter.

My parents are here, alongside my older brother, Doug.  Just down the hill are my maternal grandparents and, scattered everywhere, are aunts and uncles, first and second cousins.

A silent sanctuary surrounded by farm fields on all sides, the Otoe cemetery always feels like the quietest place on earth to me, half an hour southeast of Lincoln and only scarcely connected to the world via a tenuous network of desolate gravel roads. Dandelions fill the grounds in the spring, the roar of harvest fills the air in fall. 

My mom and dad brought me here as a girl, helping decorate graves on Memorial Day – roaming the land on summer afternoons as they pulled weeds and planted perennials. And each fall, when we were finished with our labors, my mom would teach me how a cemetery tells tales.

“Listen carefully and you’ll hear the stories,” mom would counsel, treading ever so softly among the rows.

Listen … to the soldiers buried here from way too many wars. To the achingly painful graves of children, spaces filled with unicorns and teddy bears. To the abandoned stones in the pauper’s section. To a farmer whose marker is trimmed with a cowboy boot – and buckles from his overalls. To a teenage boy’s grave, still bathed in bright flowers and longing, where we often saw a teenage girl, kneeling, sobbing. 

When you stand in a cemetery, something shifts inside, something grounding and true, an awareness that the disparate states of life and death cannot be detached.  It’s where time stands still, a coming together of the past and future, a reminder about the forever folly of human beings. 

Personally, I find our real world particularly harsh right now.  

But a cemetery stands sentry against the storms outside its gates, kindly guarding each soul here, each narrative. Time capsules of a community’s past, open-air museums of sorts.  

During my senior year in college, I joined another student, Rebecca Brite (now an editor in Paris), in choosing a “grave” mystery for our class project in depth reporting.  The Greenwood Cemetery in York had long lodged an inexplicable, tin painting that pictured three women – clad in clothes from the 1800s – bearing the banner, “We are waiting for Papa.” 

No one knew who they were.  But months of research unraveled the puzzle, the banner was a symbol of a man’s love for his family. James Bauer’s wife, Theresa, had died of gall bladder disease in 1895, their two daughters gone  before – Rose as a result of appendicitis and Frances after a miscarriage.  At some point after his wife’s death, James asked his brother-in-law to create a painting as a soothing reminder that he was not alone, that they were all waiting for him … in heaven.

Today an estimated 4.11 million graves lie in in the U.S. – with 20,250 registered cemeteries in the country, probably 150,000 cemeteries when you count every church, family and private plot.  

Rebecca and I had managed to find one cemetery’s untold story.  I still go looking for them everywhere. 

Above-ground stone crypts poised over the swamplands of New Orleans. The quirky, crowded cemetery in Key West – the vast somber National Arlington Cemetery in Virginia – Sleepy Hollow in upstate New York where Washington Irving is buried, and probably his Headless Horseman.  The peculiar, stacked bones in the Catacombs of Paris. The haunting funeral pyres outside the mystical city of Varanasi, India, where Hindus believe the Ganges River will free them from the cycle of rebirth. 

Back in Lincoln, blocks from my house, the wondrous Wyuka offers grave sites for everyone from the illustrious Gov. Charles Bryan to the infamous Charles Starkweather – and, inescapably, the tombstone with a photo of a melancholy little girl whose eyes follow you everywhere.

Each of these sacred spaces are meditations for me, places to catch your breath, reflect – not just about the mortality of those who are buried here, but about the richness of your own mortality, your very own story. 

These days, when I walk the Otoe cemetery with my granddaughters, I try to pass on my mother’s lessons. 

Hush, I tell them, and listen. Here’s the oldest monument in the cemetery, dating back to 1872 – and here are the folks who perished in the notorious tornado of 1913. Your uncle Doug lies in this space, right next to your great grandparents.  And over here is dear Aunt Emma, who, just before she died at 102, made a pact with my mom to go dancing together under the moonlight – far above the fields of the cemetery.    

Inevitably, of course, my girls want to know where GranMary will land.  And I tell them about the strangest Christmas present I ever received from my parents, two plots in the Otoe cemetery. 

“Why two?” I had asked my mom, confused. To which she replied, matter-of-factly: “Yes, we know you are divorced, but we will never give up hope for you.”

Surprisingly, still chuckling to this day, I’ve come to love that goofy, precious gift. Unless green burials arrive in Nebraska anytime soon, my kids know I want to be cremated.  But my daughter has asked if it would be ok to sprinkle at least some of my ashes here in Otoe. And how about a headstone?  And, mom, she continues:  "Look around the cemetery, which shades of marble stone do you like?"

I’ll let those questions wait for another day. Right now, as the sky darkens and dusk settles, I gaze out over the contours of the land and the changing seasons. 

I realize someone continues to tenderly tend the grounds here. I’m not sure who, but I send them a quiet prayer of thanks. I bid my parents and brother a peaceful winter slumber.  I remind my mom and Aunt Emma to dance under those starlit skies.

And I head for home.