Taken for Granite

I stopped by the cemetery on the way home from work again today. It's probably both a blessing and a curse that it's not at all far out of my way. I'm not sure I feel yet whatever it is that people are supposed to feel when they go there. Yeah, there's remembrance and sadness, but I thought there would be something... more. A communion, of sorts. Right now it's hard to see it as anything more than a recently-disturbed patch of ground with some grass seed sprinkled over it.

Last week was worse. The flowers had finally been removed and there was... nothing. That wasn't OK with me, so I went and bought a small garden flag and stand and put it where the headstone will go. She liked those sorts of flags a lot, so I think that works for now.

Some of the stones in the cemetery are very nice and quite a few people who've seen it for the first time remarked how impressed they were with the number and quality of stones. I guess they're used to cemeteries with only plaques on the ground.

As much as I like some of the stones there, I don't feel right going with any of them. So many of them feature stock images just chosen out of a book that it just didn't seem right. They have the same lighthouse or the same ducks in flight. While those are nice, they're not unique.

I had a particular scene in mind, and we found one stone in the whole cemetery that was of the style I wanted. When we sat down with the cemetery manager to discuss the stone, I began to describe what I wanted and she started to say "There's a stone you should see..."

It was that one.

I finally got a rough sketch down and we took it to the manager on Saturday. She's going to send it to the artist who did that stone, and hopefully she'll come up with something as nice as her other work. If not, who knows?

Even though I'm not an artist by any means, everyone who's seen my sketch really seems to like it. I tend to think they're just being nice, but the cemetery manager said she couldn't wait to see how it turns out.

I can't either.