Epitaphs

by Will Comerford for the Winter 2025 issue

Burying my father has put me in a cemetery mood. For his headstone, I will do what he did for his wife, my mother: the basics. Name, birthday, deathday, and an indication of relationships: Husband, Father, Grandfather. Getting poetic is risky. Even in the era of acid rain, engravings on marble last a hundred years, while words in granite last centuries. And taste in words is fickle. I suppose that’s why most people stick to the basics, by the looks of the stones in my parents’ new hillside neighborhood.

I was under the impression that our ancestors were more flowery with their death stones. But if you take a walk at the Historic Jersey City and Harsimus Cemetery, on Newark Avenue in the morning shadow of the New Jersey Turnpike, you’ll see that most of us have always been pithy in death. There are an estimated 90,000 graves throughout these six acres, mostly burials from the nineteenth century, and many from a cholera epidemic shortly after its founding. There are not too many famous names there — the Colgate family apparently once had a plot, but the old magnate ended up in Brooklyn’s Greenwood Cemetery. There is a spot holding the dust of Charles F. Durant, the first American to ascend in a balloon in 1833, and an all-around polymath and scientist. But even he kept it simple on the stone: a name and years.

Charles F. Esterling is one headstone at Harsimus that carries an epitaph: “He has faded away / Like a star from on high.” I’m no historical researcher, but I can’t dig up a single fact or shred of information about this man, other than what’s on the stone. He was not yet 32 when he died. Whoever carved the stone got it right — he has indeed faded. We’ll have to take their word for it that he was once a star. Buried with him is Jennie P. Esterling, seven years his junior, who died four years before him, at the tender age of 21. Sister or wife? Their stories are buried with them.

Maybe epitaphs are reserved for stars? Thinking of famous epitaphs, the first that jumps to mind is carved on the stone of John Keats, at the Protestant Cemetery in Rome, where he was buried after dying of tuberculosis at age 25. He did the opposite of the basics, leaving off his name and birthday entirely, and including only his deathday and some poetic words, which conclude: “Here lies one whose name was writ in water.” I don’t know if it was his intent, but it sure was an effective, counterintuitive way to get lots of people to remember his name.

Speaking of poets, William Shakespeare has a burial marker in his hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon. And what did the greatest English writer come up with to mark his grave? Well, this: “Good friend for Jesus sake forbeare, / To digg the dust encloased heare. / Blesste be ye man that spares thes stones, / And curst be he that moves my bones.”

That bit of verse is more notorious for its clumsiness and small-mindedness than anything else. Was that really his chief concern in death? The man who wrote Hamlet, King Lear, The Tempest? The man who wrote about the exhumed skull of the fictional jester, Yorick: “Here hung those lips that I have kissed I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now?” This is the man who didn’t want anyone moving his bones around? 

I think I can defend the sentiment, though. Death is a time of tangibles, and Shakespeare’s gravestone curse is all about matter. Even as our mind and soul expand into ether, we also contract into bones and stones. Maybe, just maybe, he was already aware of an emerging cult forming around his life’s work. Maybe fans would come by, asking questions and offering nutty interpretations, and he had a premonition of hundreds of years and millions of pages of analysis into what he meant, and his final verse was a carnal and feisty way of saying: “Leave me the fuck alone.” But if it was a threat about his actual remains, it didn’t work: They are apparently gone, whether stolen or washed away at some point in the past centuries.

In Ulysses, James Joyce has a bit of verse that I long remembered as an epitaph. This verse gets stuck in Leopold Bloom’s head as he rides in a carriage to Paddy Dignam’s funeral: “Rattle his bones / Over the stones / Only a pauper / Nobody owns.” But it turns out I remembered this wrong. This is not an epitaph, but a scrap from an eighteenth century song. However, with its theme of bones and stones, it’s no wonder it gets stuck in Bloom’s head at a funeral. It’s melodramatic, really, but that’s forgivable. After all, Ulysses was written by a young man in his thirties. Strange to think I’m older than Joyce was when he wrote it, and older than Leopold Bloom will ever be. When I read the book at age nineteen, thirty years ago, both of those prospects seemed inconceivable. Anyway, it’s fine that the verse is melodramatic, for it’s also emphatically true: We are all paupers in death.

For my own epitaph, I think I’d want more levity, even though humor tends to age poorly. There’s literally no graver place for humans than a cemetery, but something light might help draw out the greenness of the grass and the bright yellow of the daisies getting pushed up and fed by the soil enriched by our bodies. So I’d want something light — yet still connected to the earthy bones and stones of our destiny.

At the cemetery where my father was just buried, you can walk down the sunny green hill to a creek cutting through the grounds. It’s a creek with a bank of river shale alongside it, shale destined to one day incorporate the bone particles of my parents and others buried in the hill above. It’s the kind of shale that’s perfect for flaking off a skipping stone, like my father once showed me, many years ago, and like I showed my own children. Any time I’m beside water with flat stones, I can’t resist flinging a few, or a few dozen, especially with children around who never fail to admire my stone skipping prowess. Because when you throw the stone good and flat it skims into the water and somehow accelerates out, again and again, six times, ten times, clear across the creek, clattering onto the other bank.

And I think I’ve landed on it, my mix of earthliness and levity:

He was real good at skipping stones

For an amateur. 🏁

---

• ShareCopied to clipboard
• X
• Facebook
• Mail

---

Noisy Joy Z Opinions

Got good vibes to bounce back to the author? Gift them your gut reactions!