Years later, the small stones my brother placed on the headstones of ancestors’ graves remain, unmoved, untouched. The small cemetery may have as many occupants as there are living members of the congregation of the century-and-a-half old Baptist church that sits cross the road. Many of those occupants have my name, and many of those I remember. The row upon row of shade-less graves have no caretaker, so there is no one making rounds to clear long dead floral arrangements or scattered plastic flowers meant to be perpetual decorations. Each family cares for its family’s plot, and no one in my family has ever removed one of the stones placed by my brother.
I had never seen the quiet ritual performed anywhere else by anyone else, and so considered it a habit unique to him. It is not odd for him to perform such small practices, leaving some near unnoticeable mark of a path he has traveled or a place he has visited. The small, smooth stones, placed deliberately, balanced delicately on top of the headstone, or at the base under the common name was simply something he did, a common act of his but uncommon in the world.
Or so I thought until I walked through a cemetery in a small grove on the edge of Bethpage. The inhabitants were Quakers, buried a century ago when the resting place was already over two centuries old. There, perched on the top of this headstone, that one over there, two other farther into the trees were small, smooth stones. My brother’s ritual was not isolated, although he may have come upon it on his own, so had others, or maybe not.
This afternoon I read that the act of setting a stone over a permanent resting place, the final resting place of a loved one, is a ceremonial act that is ancient, traceable to the nomadic Children of Israel wandering toward the Promised Land across the desert, the rocky desert of Sinai. Stones marked a grave, signified an act of remembrance, continued when the site was revisited, continued today in Hebrew cemeteries.
Also continued in the resting place of Friends on Long Island and Family in Alabama.
