This woman gets it. Read and take heed. Please.

I do not want to see [grandma’s] ashes scattered to the wind, as if she has become an abstract being, at one with the universe. I want to remember her as someone with a body, a body vulnerable to sickness and death, a body that in its vulnerability was also open to love. And I want to be able to come back here, back to this particular place in this particular town, to visit her grave and the graves of the others who died before her.

We stand in a line with the coffin (“a bed inside a box for Nana’s body,” we told the kids) in front of us, supported by large metal poles over a rectangular hole in the ground. The hole in the ground offers a visual enactment of our common mortality—ashes to ashes and dust to dust. The graveyard itself acts as a testimony to the inevitability and finality of death. But as we stand together, the minister reads from Scripture. These ancient words of defiant comfort words hover above the coffin, holding out hope that this inevitable and final word has been overcome: “Where o death is thy victory? Where o grave is thy sting?”

We head to the church, where the emphasis turns to celebration. Together we remember and celebrate the life of this remarkable woman who died within one mile of her birthplace, who cooked countless casseroles for new mothers, cancer patients, and bereaved spouses, who invited dozens of new people over for dinner after meeting them for the first time on a Sunday morning, who lived a life of unassuming service to others, with much laughter along the way. Perhaps more importantly, together we celebrate the work God has done for us and for her. We celebrate not only because of the memories of love, but also through the particularly Christian hope of resurrection.

I am grateful for graveyards, for their unflinching testimony to the generations past, for their insistence that our bodies cannot live forever in spite of our medical advances and our attempts to defy aging and death. I am grateful that my children were introduced to death through this grief that was contained by hope. Most of all, though, I am grateful for the one whose body went into the grave and rose again.

Read and reflect on it all.