One of my favorite cities is Savannah and almost every time I go I visit the Bonaventure Cemetery, stopping by to visit "The Bird Girl," the statue that is on the cover of the book "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil." There are many exquisite statues and monuments in that cemetery with touching and meaningful epitaphs such as:

"Life is short and we never have enough time

For gladdening the hearts of those who travel with us

Oh, be swift to love! Make haste to be kind."

Southerners have a fascination with mortality. We innately seem to have an awareness of death's broadening presence, coupled with our sense of time and place for the living as well as the dead. Cemeteries are a place to watch the changing seasons and to learn human history. I don't remember the exact quote, but the writer Willie Morris once wrote that he went to cemeteries to feel a sense of belonging and to feel continuity with the flow of generations.

When I wander through cemeteries I have a restful, peaceful feeling. I don't mean the new suburban deathscapes of no monuments, and plastic flowers all lined up in a row, but Southern, rural graveyards. The crumbling stones evoke in me, not only a sense of the past, but an expectation that there will be a future. In a cemetery you can meditate, reflect, get your thoughts together -- and I tend to think of the occupants like company. When you pass by the graves and see their names, dates of birth, and deaths, you imagine what their lives might have been like -- and if there are epitaphs, they or their loved ones speak. To me a cemetery is also a place for us to face up to our own mortality.

I fail to understand why people want their ashes scattered in the wind, or for that matter placed in an urn. Burial in a plot provides a place, a location where the living can go for at least awhile. Even if one doesn't often return, the place remains, at least as a point of reference for the mind. It helps the mind in remembrances of the past, if it has a place as the anchor. To me, a scattering of ashes in the wind, or on a wide body of water, leaves one thoughts of the loved one in a random array. I believe it is comforting to have a special place to go in grief.

Years ago when my father was dying, he said to give his body to science, or scatter it in the wind. I said, "No, Daddy, we want you buried next to Mama in Memphis. Don't you remember those beautiful oaks and rolling hills, and how peaceful it is?" I saw his expression change from one of fear of dying to a peaceful expression. And he said, "Yes, that would be good."

After he died we buried him there, and to this day it remains a place of reference for me when I think of him and Mama.

After his death I went out to the Chapel Hill Cemetery on 15-501 and was appalled by its ugliness -- wires with no light fixtures, a few scraggly trees, no benches, no tombstones, only little grave markers with names, birth and death date, and grass growing over the markers. I found out that they could only be a certain size and flat to the ground so the mowers could mow over them. To make a long story short, many citizens petitioned the Town and, as a result, improvements were made. Now there are more trees, benches, and many tombstones -- some with epitaphs. One of the most touching calls I received years ago was a father thanking me that he could now put an angel on his little girl's grave.

Through the years I've continued to visit cemeteries, as I believe they are an expression of the culture, values, and character of the times as well as its history. A tombstone offers a comforting element to loved ones and a sense of individuality. I believe that one measure of a civilization is how it treats its dead.

Eunice Brock lives in Chapel Hill. Write to her at eunicembrock@nc.rr.com