I love cemeteries. Not in a macabre or morbid way. I love them in the quiet, reverent way one might love great libraries or cathedrals of the world. Cemeteries are wonderful places, not because of architecture or ritual, but because of the stories that are buried in their soil. Every name carved into stone once belonged to a living, breathing soul. A person who laughed, and struggled, and prayed. Someone who had hopes, who made mistakes, who fell in love, and who tried to make sense of this mortal life.

Wandering through rows of headstones, I feel their presence. I feel a connection. Not just metaphorically. My faith leads me to believe that these souls live on, simply residing beyond a veil I cannot yet see through. Death, in that light, is not the end of the story. It’s a turning of the page. A transition to another chapter that is just as real, just as vivid. I believe they are aware. That they remember. That they still care.

There is deep romance in cemeteries, too. Not the candlelight-and-roses kind, but the enduring kind, the kind that carved “beloved wife” or “our darling boy” into stone because the ache of loss demanded it. Here are husbands who died in wars and wives who waited. Infants who never walked and mothers who grieved for decades. The young who left far too soon; the old who long faced life’s cruel challenges. And many in between. And yet, somehow, in every plot there is a sense of strength and resilience. Families endured. Love outlived sorrow.

What touches my heart the most, perhaps, is how these silent spaces refuse to stay silent. They whisper. They invite. They remind us that life is fleeting, yes, but also eternal. That we are part of a larger story that connects us all, on both sides of that veil of separation. I would think that, as we too eventually find ourselves beneath this sacred ground, we all want the same thing: to not be forgotten, but to be fondly remembered. And more than that, to look forward to that great day when we all finally meet again.