my seemingly morbid fascination with graveyards is buried deep in my history. as a child, like so many in my cohort, I superstitiously held my breath as we drove by graveyards in our parent’s car, to avoid breathing in any spirits. Halloween nights in my childhood involved shuffling past faux gravestones on our neighborhood’s front lawns reading names like Willy Rot and Alby Back with epitaphs like: RIP ~ Here lies Frank, his life was full until he tried to milk a bull

in high school, I recall films like Nightmare on Elm Street and Halloween scaring us silly in darkened basement rec rooms and  inspiring us to visit graveyards wearing a hockey mask, scaring the shit out of our drunken partying friends

more recent visits to graveyards involved emotional goodbyes to friends and relatives who we put to rest in the most traditional way in our modern age. these visits inevitably make me ponder the ridiculous use of the land to store our dead loved ones in a field of tombs where a much more productive use of the land could be made in this modern age of a burgeoning, hungry population. yet, ironically, the value of cemeteries lies with the living, not the dead. these peaceful places provide us with a venue to remember and honour our dearly departed. as far as they are concerned we could have just as easily dissolved their bodies in lye and then committed their liquid remains to the municipal waste water treatment plant via a funeral procession through the sewer system; which is what I am choosing for my mortal remains. more important than grave plots is that we memorialize our loved ones through the sharing of fond (and not so fond!) stories with families and friends; photographs and memories that they leave with all of us when they punch-out for the last time.

throughout my adult life, I’ve continued to indulge my fascination with the dead, watching shows like Six Feet Under and being unable to resist the temptation on roadtrips or bicycle tours through the backroads of Southern Ontario to stop at old graveyards to take in the history reflected by the weathered words engraved on old white headstones. And they make for such fantastic photographic subject matter. The worn, weathered headstones blackened by the ages, are a small window into the past; telling of a toddler, for example, put to rest a century and a half ago, struck down early in life by an illness that today simply ends their school week, not their life

and so, the warm Autumn Sun on the gravestones, casts far reaching shadows that inevitably reach us; chilling us and reminding us that our Earthly end is inevitable and that we will one day rest in peace, humbly returned to the earth from which our life initially sprung forth