Lowery, a former pastor and “roundabout member” at Old Liberty, misses when Decoration Day meant keeping company with headstones during dinner on the ground. Death is simply something we all will do. You don’t title a novel “As I Lay Dying,” as William Faulkner did, because it sounds sweet or catchy. To die is to trade up to a celestial world that never ends. Sugarcoating gets a bad rap, but if anyone has found a way to soften the great blow of death, it is Southerners. Lest we forget that this all will come to an end some day, each spring we pass cemeteries so bright they would shame an Impressionist painter. The South claims death with as much loyalty as we claim our children. Today, we are here to eat, remember, and bask in the Southern fascination of death that is as sure as the first hellfire sermon that made you quake in the pews. There are too many people here for a church homecoming, and it’s too hot to be Easter Sunday. Others have settled next to markers in lawn chairs shielding themselves with umbrellas. Families huddle under oaks and cedars placing flowers on tombstones. That child and her relatives by death and blood sleep across the narrow road from a pasture so green it almost glows in the May sun. She thinks the child was an infant because the unmarked slab is so small. She points out a mother and daughter joint grave (died in 1868) that church congregants identified last year after months of research. She puts on white sunglasses and steps down into the graveyard that nearly swallows this humble brick church in Lawrence County, Alabama. She and a dozen other women have spent the last three days scrubbing, dusting and vacuuming Old Liberty Congregational Christian Church for this weekend. Brandy Sparks sneaks outside to puff a cigarette and avoid cleanup in the fellowship hall.
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