A PLOT WITH A VIEW
BUT NO SURPRISE ENDING
Journal of Healing – April 30, 2003

By Mary Koch

The day after Easter – it's called Easter Monday, interestingly enough – seemed an ideal time for choosing our cemetery plot. With Easter alleluias echoing in our ears, bright sun warming the air and spring colors bursting forth from the earth, the inevitability of death seemed less foreboding.

That's how I viewed it, anyway. My husband was less enthusiastic. Ordinarily John has been happy to share in my lifelong fascination with cemeteries. We've wandered through historic graveyards from Boston, Mass., to Jacksonville, Oregon, to Narita, Japan.

There's nothing like a cemetery to connect you with the past. You ponder the one universal truth about humanity: that we are mortal. Yet you feel alive. Blissfully alive.

Visiting a cemetery to select the final resting place for your own remains is a different matter altogether. You become eminently aware that you could need that burial plot before the week is out. You cling to the belief that you won't.

"The time to pick out a plot is when we're feeling healthy. We know we're going to live for years," I said to John, hoping my words did not ring hollow. He gave me a half-hearted, eyes-up signal, which is supposed to mean "yes" but more probably meant, "Whatever you say. You know you're going to win this argument anyway."

THE DIFFERENCE in our ages – 13 years – has never seemed large. But I suppose when you're 71, choosing a burial plot is less academic than when you're 58. It's not at all academic if you've been at death's door at least twice, as John has, kept alive only by God's grace and the mechanical insistence of a respirator.

I was insistent on this cemetery trip because it would be the final task on a mental list entitled Putting Our Affairs In Order. I have spent many hours over the past year conferring with lawyers, updating wills, reorganizing finances, drafting directives. Once the burial plot is chosen, the deed goes into the bottom drawer of my filing cabinet along with numerous other papers in a folder marked "In case of my death."

Who am I kidding? It's not a matter of "if" but "when." Better make a new label: "When I die." Then I can close the file drawer and go back to the matter of living.

JOHN AND I long ago agreed on the Okanogan City Cemetery because it has one of the best views in our valley. If the far-sighted city founders hadn't set it aside for burials, by now it would be prime real estate, occupied by quarter-million dollar houses with a million dollar view.

Not that the view is going to matter to us. Thomas Lynch, a funeral director and eloquent writer, points out in his book, "The Undertaking," that the dead don't care. They are beyond caring.

But I like to think that someday someone may take that winding drive up the hill to the cemetery, toting my ashes. And I like to think that whoever it is will pause to drink in the view, breathe in life and connect momentarily with eternity.

So we went to the cemetery Easter Monday. We chose a plot with expansive views up and down the valley. It's on a high knob at the very brink of the hill. John has always been prone to living on the edge.

The next day I went to city hall and wrote the check.

"Now you know where you'll be going," commented the clerk as she handed me a receipt.