Death On Campus

Here at Kenyon College, there’s a graveyard on campus. I’m here this week for a writing workshop and I stumbled across it on a walk. I found gravestones from the 1830s and the 1990s, including those of professors and alums. I’d never seen a college graveyard before. It must be a great source for campus jokes. But […]

Learning to do a funeral

Not many people die at my church (Lord, have mercy). Many members move away to warmer places in retirement. Most current members are in their 40s, 50s, and 60s, with few folks 80 and above. So, it’s taken me a while to really learn to do a funeral. Usually, the story is that a young […]

Memorial tire swing

The park near our house is full of memorial trees, and now, we also have a memorial tire swing. An 11-year old girl, Jordan Oliver, drowned in a retention pond behind her school last week. She was playing along a bridge with a bunch of other kids, slipped into deep water, and didn’t come back up. […]

The Bolingbrook Memorial Tree Program

How does a human settlement become more than land with houses on it? How do people start to merge the story of their lives and relationship with the ground they live on? One of the ways humans mark ground with stories is by making graves. Farming families started digging graveyards in the Bolingbrook area almost […]