Living Among Headstones: Life in a Country Cemetery

Responsibility is a hard to meet. This is especially true when your responsibility requires dealing with grief - the grief of others and your own grief. Shannon Applegate meets that responsibility and gives all of us a window into the struggle that doing so requires. In the process, she shares with us life in a small American town. Applegate is unique in her ability to share this experience in that her family has occupied a place in the community for six generations. Applegate exposes her prejudices and through hard experience learns to be more open and appreciative of the experiences of others. This journey is one which is rewarding not only to Applegate and the small town in which she lives but to all of us who read her book.

This is the second book of Shannon Applegate's that I have read. (Check out "Skookum" for another great tale about the Applegate family.) So I knew that I was going to be treated to a good storytelling. I was not disappointed. Shannon has a gift for crafting stories that both entertain and elucidate the reader. She writes with an honesty and poignancy untypical of many contemporary writers. Her books are worth waiting for! She touches on some of the issues I struggle with related to family connectedness and where do I want my final resting place to be? Like many, I've spent a large part of my life far away from "the homestead" and feel the tug of wanting to be two places at once. I appreciated Shannon relating the experience of sharing her brother's ashes with his two "homes." I highly recommend this to anyone who loves a good story. And in the interest of full disclosure, I should say that I am a great-great-great grandniece of Charles and Melinda Applegate. I hope I counted enough generations in there!

Living Among Headstones - Life in a Country Cemetery by Shannon Applegate What a fabulous read! It's more about life and all it's implicit meanings as woven into a tapestry of past and present, as well as some of what is inevitable in the future, than just an account of an old cemetery. The pioneer family cemetery she inherits in Yoncalla, Oregon is a platform, a stage and a point of departure for her journey of exploration of the essence of life and it's compelling human drama. Of course, this was not her plan. She thought she was going to just run a cemetery. How much trouble could that be? Well, Katie, bar the door! Through it all Shannon Applegate shares with us her strengths and weaknesses, her acuteness and obtuseness, her determination and her fears. She has portrayed all of this while at the same time writing in such a style as to transport us to that very fine spring morning with the sunlight filtering through the Douglas Fir trees projecting the dappled sun on the aging surface of the headstones. Metaphor and allegory abound. She was not afraid to put just who she is on the pages of this book, or if she was, she did it anyway. My personal expectation that Living Among Headstones would be a text book, a how-to cemetery operations manual, was wholly my own self-imposed limitation. Shannon Applegate relates stories that start with her experiences as a new sexton of the Applegate Pioneer Cemetery then charges into her own personal family past and present to share with us the deep universal human values of recollection and reflection. I am reminded of one of my highly respected teachers in a very small Midwestern high school. He would enter the room each morning and welcome us all with: "Good morning scholars, today we will come out of the darkness of ignorance into the glorious sunshine of wisdom, knowledge and brotherly love". I feel that Shannon Applegate has done that for me. We are brought into personal stories of tragedy and loss. With her sometimes-Victorian descriptions of the lives, letters, and diaries of generations gone by, Shannon gives us the pieces of life's puzzle so that we can begin to see the great value that even the smallest (and largest) events that our daily lives hold. Her work is a living monument to the connectedness and aliveness we can feel through her experience and now through her book.

I'll bet very few people know what a sexton is. I didn't before I read Living Among Headstones. The title sounds like a mystery novel, or a horror novel, but it is neither. It is a collection of charming essays about the ins and outs of a small town cemetary. Who knew what the problems of running a cemetary could be? Who gets buried where? Are you sure that space is free? Who does the mowing; who takes care of the trees? What do you do about plastic flowers; and what is it like to be in charge of the final resting place of your friends and family. If you have ever wandered through a country cemetary looking at old names and dates and listening to the silence and the bird song, you will find this a delightful short read.

In reading Living Among Headstones I found myself consistently looking back on my families, as well as my feelings about our final resting place or even if we should have one at all in a very positive light. A wonderful read to see how an inherited cemetery has affected a local lady, her family, and a small logging town. I found Shannon Applegate's novel to be quite entertaining,informative, and very hard to put down. I can't say how many times I laughed with her as she told many a tale. I loved her descriptions of the cemetery which made me feel as if I was right there walking beside her. I wanted to experience the cemetery so I made a point to locate it and walk through it. I could see the many items left on the graves as well as the plastic flowers as I read, yet they did not diminish the beauty of the cemetery in the least in person, they enhanced and personalized it for me as well as she seemed to realize. I was not in the least disappointed as to what I found and felt as I walked through the cemetery, except for the wish that Shannon was my guide in person. I would love to thank her for sharing herself in such a open and beautiful way. I recommend this book to anyone, especially if cemeteries are one of those things you avoid. This book is sure to give you a much different perspective.