A chance visit...

Since we're staying out in Belvidere, our journey to places that we need to go in the greater Chicago area take us different ways than Carl is used to going. On Thursday, he had a return visit to a doctor in Naperville, and we ended up zig-zagging on roads through small towns and crop fields for quite a distance. One town we went through was Burlington, and Carl mentioned that the cemetery where Sue was buried was on Burlington Road (which was the road that we were on). Sure enough, in a few miles, he recognized the cemetery and drove in for a quick visit...

Remembering Sue... it is always a little somber to think of her being gone, but also to remember the blessing she was in Carl's and her family's lives!

Carl also says that he likes to check every once in a while to be sure that a death date for him has not been entered on the stone...

While he says that humorously, a few years ago when he did his pre-arrangements with the funeral home for his final expenses, he mentioned that to to the funeral home manager as a joke. The manager said that wasn't as funny as he might think... that the manager had contracted with a company to go inscribe the death date for a person who had recently died. The manager gave the company the name and the section of the cemetery where the gravestone was located. It wasn't a common name (not like "Williams"!), say something like Harold E Winchester. A few days later, the contracted company rep contacted the funeral home and said that the task was completed. The funeral home guy contacted the family of "Harold"; the family later called back and said that they had visited the cemetery and that the stone had not yet been engraved. The funeral home guy went back to the contracted company, and they sent a picture... it was a different "Harold E Winchester's" gravestone (but within the same section of the cemetery) on which they had inscribed a death date. It turned out that the funeral home knew the other family too, and contacted the son of that still-living "Harold", just to let him know and to ask that he not take his father to visit the cemetery for a few days -- promising that they would be correcting the stone within the next week. The son thanked them and wanted to make sure that it would be corrected soon as his father would want to visit his wife's grave on her birthday which was coming up! So, if you have a stone in a cemetery, you may want to check it to make sure that a death date hasn't been carved on it for you yet!