Walt Whitman and Cemetery

Honestly, Walt Whitman freaks me out. obviously, he is a brilliant writer and his poem " When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," is a great poem, but I just get freaked out by stuff like that. Towards the end of the poem he was pretty praising death, at first I honestly thought it was because I was in the cemetery that made the poem as creepy as I thought it was, but I went home and read over the poem again over the weekend and it still gave me chills.

The trip to the cemetery was a very interesting event. As long as I can remember I've been incredibly scared to walk in a cemetery, more than the fear for the cemetery in and of itself, I have always been terrified of the dead. I've been to two funerals so far and they were the most frightening experiences in my entire life. The first was of my aunt and we were really close, she pretty much raised me for a good portion of my childhood and she didn't have any kids so she pretty much treated me like I was her owns, she passed so long ago, but I still remember everything as if it just happened yesterday, I remember visiting her in the hospital the previous day and she was telling me how she was coming soon and she just looked like she was doing so well, but the following day she passed. I remember going to the funeral and having to see her lay in the casket "my memory is so vivid right now," I remember all the crying and all the dreams I use to have, after that moment I promised myself that I would never go to another funeral unless I have absolutely no choice. Last year I went to another funeral and this time it was my cousin and because of the situation she had a closed-casket funeral so that wasn't as bad, but I still had dreams about it and I couldn't sleep for days.
So this field trip to the cemetery was more to me than just a trip, it was an opportunity to face another one of my fears. It was difficult seeing some of the tombstones and to see the age that these people died, many of them were kids my age and some even younger, one of the more tragic things I saw when I saw a pair of tombstones of two brothers, one was 5 years-old and the other was 7 years-old and they died on the same day, I can only imagine what the family went through that day, the pain they must of felt of having to bury not one but two of their kids.