The Big Sandy Mountaineer -

For most of you who read my rants and raves often, you know that I am a Brother Van Methodist. In my family that all got started when my uncle Robert Charles Stuart died at age 6 from eating a poisoned apple by mistake.

Up until that time Grandma and Grandpa Stuart did not go to church at all. But after Bobby died they decided to start going to church and of course they had to be Methodists. Grandpa Stuart’s father was a Methodist tent preacher in Virginia. Grandpa Stuart’s brother John in addition to being an engineer on the Great Northern was a Methodist preacher for six High-line towns and my mother’s cousin Marvin became the Methodist Bishop for this conference of the Methodist Church.

Bobby was buried outside of the fence at Highland Cemetery because the family did not have enough money to buy a grave in the real cemetery. My mother told me that this time of year for years when Grandpa and Grandma Stuart came in from their farm between Beaver Creek and Bull Hook Creek they would stop at a wild rose bush and pick some wild roses to decorate Bobby’s grave.

These days Bobby’s grave is now a part of the regular cemetery. It was always my mother’s wish that when she died she be buried next to her brother Bobby as she thought he must be lonely being so far from his family. She is buried next to Bobby.

And even, when mother was living for thirty years in Lakeside, always on Memorial Day she had to come back home to Havre to decorate the graves of her loved ones.

Because that is what you did.

I do that to this day but I notice that there are a lot of graves that go undecorated these days. It is like that little part of history is gone with the wind to paraphrase the great Civil War novel.

Sometimes I wonder who will decorate my grave and maybe it does not matter one whit anyway whether a grave gets decorated.

However, while I can, I go around on Memorial Day or a couple of days before and decorate the graves of loved ones, family and friends just like mother did.

I put flowers on the graves of Francis and Laened Black, Grandpa and Grandma Lucke, my father, Lou Lucke Junior, my mother and Bobby, along with Grandpa and Grandma Stuart.

While there I made sure those graves look nice and will get through the summer well. I do that because that is what you do.

But for many it is not what is done anymore.

That is all right too. Maybe the best way to honor those people who have passed on is to live a life the way you know that would want you to live that life.

Decorating graves is great but living a good life because of them is even better.