Have you ever asked yourself where Tombstone, Arizona got its peculiar name? If you’re like me, you probably assumed it was a town full of tombstones. We’ve all heard the story of the Earp brothers and Doc Holliday and the infamous shootout at the OK Corral in Tombstone. Shootouts usually result in tombstones. But, if you thought like me, well, you’d be wrong. The name has nothing to do with an abundance of tombstones in the town.
Legend–fairly reliable–says that the town founder, Ed Shieffelin was scouting the area for new places to mine ore. A friend of his, also an army scout in a former life (just as Ed was), heard what Ed was up to. He told him, “The only rock you will find out there will be your own tombstone.” A second version–close to the first–had his friend Sieber say to Shieffelin, “Better take your coffin with you, Ed. You will only find your tombstone there, and nothing else.” Ed Schieffelin thought it was funny, or funny enough to name the town Tombstone later when he filed his first claim on the site. It is worth noting that the place of the claim was near a grave, so maybe that fact also played some part in the naming.
There aren’t all that many tombstones in Tombstone. There aren’t all that many living souls in Tombstone either, so it’s not just the cemetery that is a dead place. Last estimate was something like 1300 living folks there. No one has counted the dead ones–to my knowledge. About the only people that visit Tombstone these days are history buffs who want to see the OK Corral. Some of the old buildings have been reconstructed to add to the mystique of the Old West. I don’t think there are any whorehouses anymore, although they were popular in the town’s heyday. If the downsizing continues on course, the town may become another ghost town like so many others that were thriving places during those bygone days of cowboys and horse thieves and gunslingers. If that happens, about the only thing that will be left in Tombstone will be the tombstones.
When I bought my tombstone a few years ago–the same time we bought my dad’s (two for the price of one–a great deal)-I asked the owner of the monument store how long the tombstone would last. Being a good salesperson, he said it could last forever. I knew better. As a college student, I had spent my summers as the caretaker of the local cemetery. I mowed, watered, filled in sinking graves, and learned where everybody’s grave was so I could help out-of-town visitors in their search for departed loved ones. What I learned during those hot summers is that no tombstone lasts forever. The oldest ones in the cemetery–erected in the late 1800s–already were decrepit and on their last leg. Some had disappeared altogether and we had to put a plain white concrete cross on the unmarked grave, much of it guesswork on our part. After a particularly heavy rain, we found sinkholes in places not seen before. So we marked those as graves as well, although nobody knew whose graves they were. The experience left me skeptical about the longevity of grave markers as a whole.
I pass by my tombstone regularly as I now pay a visit to my parents’ graves, my future neighbors to the immediate west. I am comforted by the thought that we could reach out and touch one another, or turn and face one another if we wanted to have a conversation when my time comes. I look at those tombstones and ask the same question, “How long will they stand?”
We’d like to think like the salesperson and believe that the tombstone will stand like a sentinel through the ages, letting multiple future generations know we once walked the earth as they now walk it. Again, being the realist, I believe that after a handful of generations–literally–the stone will no longer stand and–more painful to consider–no one will remember us, except for an occasional genealogist or the guy who mows the grass once a week. I know we like to think we’re important–and you for one might be–but importance is short-lived and over-rated.
The great composer Mozart was buried in an unmarked grave. Seventeen years after his death, his widow couldn’t locate the grave. Attempts were made in later centuries and finally a monument was put somewhere in the cemetery to commemorate this musical prodigy. A friend of mine visited the same cemetery once and said he searched a long time before he found an overgrown marker that indicated Mozart’s resting place. Somewhere in that story is a lesson. But we don’t have to go as far back as Mozart. Steve Jobs of iPhone fame was buried (intentionally) in an unmarked grave.
My mom asked that the names of her children be engraved on the backside of her tombstone. As she said, “My kids are all I have to show for my life.” It was a teary-eyed moment for me when she said it to me. It served no purpose for me to tell her she had more to show for her life. If this was the way she chose to summarize her life, then I felt it was her call, not mine.
You don’t see too many epitaphs on tombstones anymore. They were more popular long ago. We tend to stick to the bare facts on our contemporary stones–DOB, date of marriage (assuming no divorce), and DOD. More people are thinking like my mom and so are putting their children’s names on the backside–probably for the same reason.
As I said, back in the day, epitaphs were the thing. Often, they were a way to memorialize the beloved and–just as often–they were a way for the beloved to have the last word. Like the epitaph on one man’s grave that reads, “Abandoned in old age by wife and children. May God be more understanding and merciful.” One woman named Kay had her recipe for fudge engraved on the backside of her tombstone (Those who tried the recipe said they weren’t impressed with the fudge). An old gunslinger in the West insisted his epitaph read: “He never killed a man that did not need killing.” A young man’s tombstone from some years back had this interesting epitaph: “Lost life by a stab in falling on ink eraser by evading six young women trying to give him birthday kisses in Office Building.” Ouch.
My mom used to say she thought my grandmother–her mother-in-law–had composed some of the prettiest epitaphs she had seen on tombstones, these being on the graves of the three children she had lost. I’d agree. On her oldest son’s tombstone, dragged to death by a horse while plowing the field when he was ten years old, she inscribed these words, “A faithful, loyal son, and a friend to all.” She lost her second son when he was one year old and she placed these words on his tombstone, “A little bud of love to bloom with God above.” Her only daughter lived three months and she wrote these words on her monument, “A fairer bud of promise never bloomed.” How sad that my grandmother became so good at something so tragic.
A much newer monument that caught my eye on a recent visit to the same cemetery marked the grave of a young man, nineteen years old. These words were written below his name, “Our hearts are broken, but your struggles are over.” It seemed to me much was left unsaid. His monument had a picture of him holding his dog in his lap–a better, happier day for him.
Epitaphs, it seems to me, have an impossible task. They are forced to compress into a few words the complexity of a human person’s life. How do you describe a person in four or five words? It’s an impossible task. I remember hearing a priest preach a sermon one time in which in claimed that each person’s life could be described in one word. All we had to do was think long and hard for that one word that says it all. I thought it was overreach when he said it and I still think it’s simplistic and reductionistic. Who would claim you could determine the taste of a fine wine with one sip, or know the sweetness of a ripe fruit in one bite, or know your true love with one kiss?
In the end, I don’t think the words on a tombstone tell the story. That story is told by family and by friends as they remember the one they loved and who they wish they could have back with them and who realize their life is emptier without that person in it. The story or stories they tell is the one that counts because therein are the true sentiments about the person and the kind of life he or she lived.
I once read somewhere that the old rabbis used to teach that there are several stages to death. The rabbis claimed that the final death only came when the last person still alive spoke the departed person’s name aloud for the last time. Then that person had finally died. There was no one else to speak his or her name. There is a haunting truth in that thought, greater than anything a tombstone might say.
Sunday Brunch 