why's it so dead around here?

Frobi made the observation that funeral homes and stuff like that keep cropping up in my posts, and he's absolutely right. I may not have explained why, at least not all in one place, so I will now.
Pay attention. I'm only going to do this 50 or 60 more times.

In the small town I grew up in, my family acted as the caretakers of the local pioneer cemetery. We really did know where all the bodies were buried.
Most summer Sundays found the whole extended group of us there, mowing, arguing, scrubbing tombstones free of moss, clearing away faded arrangements and repairing vandalism.
These are very happy memories. My grandmother was always there with her gardening butcher knife in one hand and her clippers in the other. We'd drag in a huge white sheet filled with fresh flowers from her garden and we'd decorate everyones' marker with them. Our people first, of course.
It was always a beautiful day. The place was filled with enormous, glorious flowering trees and shrubs of all descriptions which grew with the kind of rank vigor that I've only seen vegetation in Oregon's climate exhibit. Hummingbirds were everywhere, bees everywhere, and robins nested in the decorative finials topping the tallest stones. Sometimes deer cropped the grass and watched us.
Because many times families could not afford a stone at the time of burial, it was common to mark a grave with a distinctive plant. Some of the plots were perfect small garden rooms in themselves, planted with cypress and cedar and yew and box, all symbols of everlasting life.
The Infant's Garden overlooked the valley. Small white lambs slept atop many of the stones. The saddest one bore an empty nest in a wreath of marble ivy. I always decorated their graves first, and was certain that this cheered them up. My grandmother aided and abetted this by sneaking live trilliums from the edges of the woods and transplanting them atop the little plots so there would always be a beautiful flower on each one every spring.

Thanks to this experience, graveyards hold no terror or icky fascination for me; no more than any other over-decorated park or garden might. In fact some of the best head I've ever

never mind.

Because my adopted parents were also quite a bit older than average, I spent a greater than average amount of time at rest homes, hospitals and attending funerals.
Hospitals back then were pretty grim places for a little kid, what with the low lights and whispering and the smell of Lysol and boiled food. And as far as the 'rest homes' go, let me tell you - back then your average rest home was a Dickensian nightmare. They reeked of urine and mildew, and I mean stank DOWN THE STREET. I've described in other places being a child, standing next to the beds of people so shrunken by age and disease that they were translucent, people covered in stained dressings who seemed to be dissolving, people black with cancer, or literally rotting away with bedsores...people hung with tubes attached to machines that exited directly into open buckets on the floor.

All this made a lasting impression on me. It also made me immune to the 'romance' of death, praise Jesus!

When you spend as much time as I do dog- sick, you have a lot of time to worry about your mortality. When you throw clinical depression into the mix, you get a degree of worry that fades from indigo to utter black. That's not so much of a problem for me these days. But I tell you what, when I'm feeling like shit, sometimes dying still scares me.
Being scared pisses me off. Being pissed off and scared makes me want to stop being pissed off and scared. The way to do that is to learn about what's scaring you and pissing you off. So I learn. And you know what? Dead shit is interesting.

I have had a really strange life. It's made me a really strange person. Really strange, and really brave, and really partially informed about a whole hell of a lot of really different things.
I like that pretty well.
Welcome to my blog.