My Florida

Every Day Is Memorial Day

My Florida by Melody Murphy [melody@ocalasgoodlife.com]

Last fall I started walking every day in the old cemetery behind my house. To some, haunting cemeteries might be morbid, but I’ve always liked them. I find them peaceful, full of imagination and history.

If you’ve lived in a place for a long time, which I have for 33 years now, the longer you walk in a cemetery, the more people you know. It’s just like going to Publix, except when you run into dead people you know, they don’t ask you when’s the next time you’re going to be in a play.

It is startling the first time you round a corner and run across someone you knew: You taught music at the college. I remember you playing the piano, daily counting down to your retirement, steadfast as a metronome. I dated your father. I knew you from church choir. You taught history at my high school. You taught ballet for years. I remember you selling nutcrackers at a table full of sugarplums in the theater lobby every Christmas. You two volunteered at the civic theatre—no relation, and yet here you are, buried under the same patch of grass, just a few paces apart. Soon you realize that every lane through this cemetery is full of memories.

It’s also a little startling when you stop to rest a moment and realize you’re standing on the grave of someone whose name you recognize from old headlines: I remember when you were killed in the line of duty.

Truly jarring is when the name of a living person you know is already engraved next to their departed spouse, just waiting for a date after the dash.

Some days your own birthday jumps out at you: You died on my ninth birthday. You were born on my birthday 78 years before I was.

At times, familiar old names leap off the weathered stones: You ran the hardware store. You owned that restaurant I had forgotten about. You were a photographer. You gave swimming lessons to generations. You were the chief of police. I went to high school with your son. I forgot you died when we were that young.

Familiar surnames catch your eye, names you know from Ocala history, now chiseled in stone in adjoining family plots: You were among the founders of Marion County. Sometimes you’re surprised to find a famous person: I did not know a former governor of Florida was buried here.

Or sometimes you finally meet someone you didn’t really know but feel like you did. One day a year ago I was walking with a friend, looked down, stopped dead in my tracks, and exclaimed to the ground, “Well hey, y’all! I live in your house!”

I enjoy research and like to know the history of a place. When I moved into my house, I looked up who the former owners had been. One family, it turned out, for 60 years. Because this is Ocala, at the heart of which is still a small town, it took one conversation with another long-time resident to find out she had known them. Sweet people by all accounts, raised a nice family in that house—my house. Our house.

In fact, when I saw Mrs. O.’s picture in her obituary, I remembered seeing her in the choir of the church we attended when we first moved here because she was always smiling. When you’re in middle school, you wonder how anyone can seem that genuinely and consistently happy. Mrs. O. also had been a devoted member of the garden club. “I’ll bring you some camellias from our yard when they bloom this winter,” I promised her that spring afternoon. (My friend who was with me has known me for a while. Talking to dead people I do not know is not even the strangest thing she has seen me do.)

And in January, when the first camellia bloomed, I did. Because when you walk daily in a cemetery, every day is Memorial Day.