Some of my fondest childhood memories are of my parents taking my brothers and me out on a tepid autumn Saturday afternoon for a family picnic.
I remember my anticipation as I watched my mom load up the picnic basket with sandwiches, fruits and snacks; fill the cooler jug with cherry-flavored Kool-Aid; and fold up the blanket we would use as a tabletop.
I would jump into the back seat, making sure my seatbelt was safely tucked deep into the crevice of the seat so I wouldn’t sit on it, lean forward between my parents in the front seats, and think about the adventures and discoveries I would encounter as we made our way over the river and through the woods, headlong to a graveyard.
Yes, a graveyard.
While this may sound like an episode straight out of the Addams Family, I assure you it was far from creepy and kooky. My father had taken an interest in our family genealogy, and in the pre-internet era, field work was a necessity. Along with visits to libraries and historical societies, my father would travel with family in tow among the cemeteries of South Jersey, searching for artifacts of our family’s distant past.
The cemeteries we visited were old, some having dates as far back as the early 1700s. Many of them were small, hidden, and unkept.
As my mom sought out the perfect spot for lunch, my brothers fumbled around, and my sleuth-dad investigated gravestone after gravestone, jotting notes in a spiral notebook, taking Polaroid pictures and making tender etchings of headstones that weather and time began to erase. I would wander about the gravesites.
I was fascinated by the ancient headstones. The mystery of a mere name and a date opened my imagination to endless possibilities. I would imagine their everyday lives, who they were, and what they did living in a world that was only a school textbook to me. But these were real people who lived day-to-day real, ordinary lives, like us.
As Catholics, we believe that the dead are like us, as our souls are immortal and will be reunited with our resurrected bodies at the Last Judgment.
November is a time when we Catholics traditionally remember and pray for those who have died, which is probably why I am reminded so often this time of year of our family’s graveyard picnics.
Pope Francis said that remembering and praying for the dead allows us “to have a truly realistic vision of the lives they lived, to understand the meaning and the value of the good they accomplished, their strength, their commitment and their generous and unselfish love” and helps us to “understand the meaning of a life that aspires not to an earthly homeland, but to a better, heavenly homeland.”
My father’s example of honoring the dead in our family through researched remembrance – Revolutionary War and Civil War veterans, farmers and oystermen – gave me a connection to a lineage that captivated me as a child. As an adult, my faith has taught me to pray that perpetual light will shine upon them.
In November, the Church especially prays for those souls in purgatory who cannot pray for themselves, waiting to see the face of God. Since we have no way of knowing who’s there and who’s not, we pray for them all.
This month, my wife and I and whichever of our children we can muster up, will make our annual pilgrimage to the cemeteries where our parents lay. My wife and I both lost our parents by our mid-20s, so our children never had the chance to meet their grandparents. However, they know them through the pictures we show them and the stories we tell. This way, our children will know their connection to their lineage. When we visit the graveside, we say a prayer, and I retell the stories or our graveyard picnics.
Deacon Dean Johnson serves at Church of the Holy Family, Sewell.
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