Earlier this year, my mother’s side of the family gathered in the mountains of Western Virginia to bury my grandmother, who had died at the age of 99. She would be joining her husband, my grandfather, who was buried a decade before in a small cemetery hidden in the woods, owned by a local Church of the Brethren congregation that first came to the Shenandoah Valley in the 1700s. Though my grandparents both were Catholic, my grandfather had wanted to be buried in the remote Virginia mountains he loved.
The funeral and subsequent time with family were, of course, in honor of my deceased grandmother. …