Life goes on...

My parents are in Florida this week, and I sent with them a rock from our house here in Colorado to be placed on my grandparents' grave. It's a grave I may never visit again, now that my parents have moved to Colorado.

There are lots of supposed reasons that Jews put stones on the gravemarkers of our dead. I've heard these:

• It signifies that this person is honored enough to have visitors -- the deceased has not been forgotten.
• It is reminiscent of biblical times, when graves were marked with a pile of stones.
• Stones were originally used to hold down notes that visitors wold place on graves, lest they blow away.
• The stone opens a channel of communication between the visitor and the dead.

I've always thought the stone on the grave was a nice gesture, though clearly for the living. My grandparents graves in Florida have a flat marker, and often the groundskeepers just push the rocks to the side, where they become part of the sandy soil, framing its edge with the evidence of years' worth of visits. Like the tree in the picture, they have become part of the graves' permanent landscape and will remain, even when the visits stop.