Curious: picnics in the graveyard

[Green1]

Unrelated, but when I was a teenager I dated this girl.

We were constantly looking for places to have nookie, since we both lived with our parents. Doing it in the car sucked because I had a small Chevy Sprint - Chevy's answer to the Geo Metro that was popular back then as an inexpensive car with a lot of gas mileage.

I was very familiar with the back roads of Hinds and Rankin county, Mississippi and I knew of a dead end dirt road off another dirt road in the middle of nowhere. It was far from the city lights of Jackson and you could actually see the Milky Way. It dead ended in the middle of a lot of trees and you could not see the car from the road so as not to attract the attention of nosy people or Sheriff's deputies.

We get out there, lay out a blanket, and handle our business. It becomes a regular spot for us.

One night, she rolls over and we notice out of place stones out in the middle of the woods where we had been laying.

I go get the flashlight.

It appears that under the leaves and such, there are old grave markers everywhere! This is some forgotten, old graveyard that now totally reclaimed by forest!

Sort of freaked out, I try to dig up some of the more intact stone from 2 inches of decayed leaves covering it. Most of the markers are so old, the writing is gone on them. But, a few I could barely make out the years. 1820, 1855, and the latest one I could find - 1902.

Needless to say, we needed to find another spot.

But not many people can say they did it on a grave - even inadvertently.

[Unorthodox]

I don't understand why it was so off-putting. 

[Green1]

I don't understand why it was so off-putting. 

More for HER than for me. After all, she was the one who controlled if we had sex or not. It freaked me out only because I did not expect graves in the middle of nowhere out in a wooded area than did not look like it used to be a graveyard. More of a wow than a "OMG.. we got to get out of here we are defiling something" kind of freak out.

I laughed hysterically about it.

[Lorizael]

I don't understand why it was so off-putting. 

Maybe there were more hands than expected?

[Green1]

I don't understand why it was so off-putting. 

Maybe there were more hands than expected?

I am quite sure the hands were still 5 to 6 feet still buried under our blanket. Nor do I think that dead person would have cared even if alive. The marker we were "on top" of was someone who died really young. Name was gone since that part of the stone had crumbled, but it was 1834 to 1842. Not sure about you guys, but at 8 years old, I was thinking about Star Wars action figures. Not girls.

Mississippi was a very rural area. Farmland and such. Probably some family that had a tragedy - a young death - on a homestead out there but have married, remarried, and long since moved on and sold the land. I don't think it was a slave graveyard or anything, but I did hear stories of developers in MS occasionally running across slave graveyards. Most slave graveyards, the masters did not want to spend money to have a stone engraved. That stuff was expensive back then. Still is.

[Elok]

Can't say I get this. To me, death is... the point at which a living thing stops doing living-ish stuff and we don't think we have any ability to make it start doing living-ish stuff again. It sucks. But it's just this dumb thing that happens because we live in a sloppy, hectic universe.

I've never understood revering death or anthropomorphizing it or believing it's what gives life value or anything like that.

We think in narratives.  The ends of narratives are generally highly significant.  Death is the end of life.

[Lorizael]

I am quite sure the hands were still 5 to 6 feet still buried under our blanket. Nor do I think that dead person would have cared even if alive. The marker we were "on top" of was someone who died really young. Name was gone since that part of the stone had crumbled, but it was 1834 to 1842. Not sure about you guys, but at 8 years old, I was thinking about Star Wars action figures. Not girls.

Oh I really thought an undead threesome was a legitimate possibility until you neatly deconstructed it.

[Rusty Edge]

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/picnic-in-cemeteries-america?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=atlas-page

I remember taking picnics with grandma in the graveyard, and not just around memorial day.  Just because. 

Picnics, tombstone rubbings, reading under the tree...They were 'normal' activities to me as much as any park.  I didn't realize it's just how she was raised and was just something normal to her as well.   

As such, I've never really understood wider societies 'rules' and etiquette.  Kind of a sad thing to lose, really. 

Anyone else ever practice this?

We were at a funeral recently on my wife's side of the family. One of my favorites, a 90 year-old lady, explained that they'd recently taken a bunch of beer to the graveyard to celebrate her husband's birthday, something they regularly do, and he has been dead for 30-some years.

[E_T]

Wrong thread