Greetings to all you who survived 2007 and welcome to 2008! As always, time ticks by at an alarming rate. The Gravestone Girls made a resolution this year to be in touch on a regular schedule, albeit with less frequency. We agreed to do a bi-monthly Epitaph that would give us the time to put thought and content into our correspondence, thereby making us FAR more interesting and appealing (if that were possible). So, we will arrive in your inbox beginning in February and carry on bi-monthly from there. No more of this higgledy-piggeldly last minute stuff for us!!

As we are in the thick of winter in Massachusetts, there’s not a lot of snooping around cemeteries going on. The Girls are holed up inside creating new goodies and making new contacts to surprise you all with come warm springtime weather. In the meantime, the reading we’ve been doing seems strongly rooted in the change in modern cemeteries, gravestones and epitaphs. There was a time when a late 20th-early 21st century cemetery was routinely passed by on Gravestone Girls outings. Now we find ourselves regularly drawn in to hear what the newly deceased have to say about themselves. One of our favorites, and more controversial, is The Happy Tomato gravestone for Red Lemire in Auburn, MA.

You view this stone and know this guy had a sense of humor, lived large and loved life. You can also deduce his widow’s selection of artwork was dear to him and reflected who her husband was. You can further surmise that erecting that headstone may have raised some eyebrows in the quiet town of Auburn.

What are your rights when purchasing a cemetery plot? What can you, and can’t you, do to personalize your eternal resting space? Who determines what is in good taste, and what is not? Tough questions to navigate. “It’s mine, I bought it, I can say what I like”---right? This will probably be a never-ending debate, but if the folks of the new centuries didn’t keep evolving, neither would their cemeteries and headstones. We memorialize ourselves and our departed in a more personal manner than ever before. And we suspect it will continue to develop more character and become even more introspective. It gives taphophiles like The Gravestone Girls a more profound look into the lives of those that went before us. Thus fulfilling the true purpose of cemeteries to an even more infinite degree of meaning and history.

Read more about the evolution of the modern cemetery from a very well-thought out Boston Globe article pulled from the 2005 archives… Extreme Epitaphs The Happy Tomato made it into this article as well. We suspect there will be talk about Red Lemire’s afterlife for a very long time…..

Memento Mori!

The Gravestone Girls -
Putting the 'Rave' Back in Grave

	We recently lost someone near and dear to The Girls. Viola “Mimi” Aktarian died suddenly on January 18, 2008. A landlord once to one of The Girls, “Meem” fed us, took care of us, scolded us, was a friend to us and an amazing lady who could hold her Manhattans better than any of us. We miss you already Meem. Requiescat In Pace