Our Sympathy

Everything was soaked as rain flew in from every direction. Seamen, their clothing plastered wet, grasped at the ropes that blew with the wind, slicing through the storm. Sails came loose and slapped any who ventured near to tie them down again. Curses and prayers in Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, and Irish brogue mixed with the screaming of the weather. In all the commotion, no one missed the deckhand as he lost his balance on the pitching bow and was thrown to the waves. He washed up on one of Dillingham’s beaches several days later.

That is probably what happened.

In Dillingham’s oldest cemetery, there is a plain wooden cross bearing a simple epitaph: “Nineteen-year-old Sailor from Sweden.” We don’t mark graves with carved stone because there is no local craftsperson with that ability. Instead, all our graves have carved wooden crosses with the identifying information painted black, stark as gravel against the foaming edge of a wave.

One of the beautiful things about the wooden cross markers is that they are all made in the same fashion. There is no competition in a Dillingham cemetery. To visit the cemetery is to see that in death, we are all equal. Peace is the final appointment under a cross that speaks not of failures or human accomplishments but of humanity. A wooden cross says only that a life existed and judges not what sort of life it was. The wooden cross shows that the dead beneath it belonged to our community and that we still hold them despite their absence.

The crosses also speak of hope because they are a symbol of what many in our community believe is offered the soul of man. In the sadness of a death, a local resident carves a symbol that states that death is not the end and that our separation from one another can be temporary. Because we live closely, we share our beliefs, our life experiences, and our remembrance at the end.

Since the crosses are simple painted wood, they weather and would eventually become indecipherable but for periodic maintenance by residents today. The marker of the nineteen-year-old Swedish sailor has been refinished with the same regularity as the local grandparents sleeping with him. Maintaining the crosses means that the community never forgets those who depart, and this stranger we buried receives the same honor. What we knew of him, we preserve and maintain, and keep him even though he was not born to us. We resurrect his cross with all the others, and we think of him. In death, he became part of our community and is marked as a life to honor.

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