By JIM NICHOLS

While delivering Meals on Wheels, it is not unusual to pick up the newspaper in the yard or ask if I need to check the mailbox. One of the women on my route appreciated receiving the paper, but consistently complained about how small it was becoming. She was right. Like many local newspapers, advertising revenue has fallen as has readership due to the availability of news from electronic sources. Writers have been cut and the paper has physically shrunk. One time she said, “I don’t know why I don’t just cancel the paper; all I read are the comics and the obituaries.”

Do you read (or even look at) obituaries? I used to be a critic of the activity (too weird), but I have converted now. Sometimes they concern people I know. There is a standard format, but occasionally, even for strangers, there is a fascinating life tale. We always note how old the deceased is. How does that age compare to mine?

As a chaplain, it is not unusual to be in the presence of the body of someone who has just died. I remember my first time alone in a hospital room with such a man as we waited for his family to arrive. I did not know him, but the arriving family soon began filling in his life story for me.

Humans are storytellers, are we not? Even if we have no firsthand knowledge of the situation, our minds (at least for me) create a story to explain what has happened. The next time you pass a traffic accident note how your observations try to build a story (an explanation) of what has occurred.

Wandering through a cemetery is a good place to build stories. The gravestones have, at minimum, two dates, the birth and death. Occasionally, there will be scriptures or phrases that must have seemed important to the survivors. Most moving to me are dates that do not follow what most of us consider a “standard” lifespan.

Every cemetery has such examples, but several weeks ago far out in the country I attended a burial in a “cowboy cemetery” (I did not make that up). Many of the gravestones indicated that the cemetery had been used as far back as the late 1800s; often they were young children. In a strikingly different time for science and medicine (before antibiotics and vaccines), life for an infant was precarious. The stone notes were moving; one infant’s read “From the arms of Mother to the arms of Jesus.” Clearly, there was a story there and a tragic one, at that.

Both my parents and my parents-in-law are buried in the same cemetery in Kansas City. My wife and I intend to use the same place. Once when I was wandering around those grounds, I encountered the grave of a school classmate from my youth. He was a neighbor and we shared elementary, junior, and senior high school. He had an unusual last name so there was no mistaking his identity. His birth and death dates were reasonable; he was born the same year as I and died about ten years ago.

Beside his grave, however, were two others with the same unusual last name; clearly, these were relatives. The two females had death dates seven days apart 30 years ago. Female A had a birthdate indicating she was 30 when she passed. Female B had a birthdate indicating she was ten when she died.

As weird as it sounds, here I was doing arithmetic in a cemetery. My mind started building a story. These two females were the daughter (or daughter-in-law) and granddaughter of my friend. One was the mother of the other. They had died within days of one another when my childhood friend was still middle-aged. He had had to attend the funerals of each within the same week.

The transitory nature of human life is one piece of reality that just sits in our hearts and does not budge. Occasionally, however, scripture holds it up to us. Psalm 90 reminds us that we are returning to dust, that yesterdays will be swept away, and that we should “number our days.”

That must be scripture’s way of describing cemetery arithmetic.

Jim Nichols is a retired Abilene Christian University biology professor and current hospice chaplain