I have managed to gain a few fans in the five-plus years I have been writing this column.  Unfortunately, the greatest of these has been lost to me. Barbara Burns, my Grannie, had been my biggest fan since birth.  Each week she clipped and saved my column from the Coastal Journal/Forecaster until she could no longer see to read them.  Then she would find somebody to read them out loud.  She couldn’t have been prouder of me if I were writing for The New York Times.  And then, last week, she passed on at the age of 97.

I wonder if I would have an interest in history without her influence.  She gave me a book called “Adventures in Archeology” for Christmas in 1986, a book that I still love.  She gave me my original 1936 copy of “Owen’s History of Bath, Maine.”  And she gave me a rare original copy of “The Rivers and Marshes of Small Point, Maine,” by Emma Sewell, which somehow got donated to the library while I was away at college.

She also told me much about the old days.  As a child, she remembered a parade in Bath that featured an African Pygmy, caged like a zoo animal.  She was part of the pageant for the opening of the Carlton Bridge in 1928.  Recently she told me a story about her father working for Maine Central Railroad.  When I asked what he did for the company, she said (rather sarcastically), “How can I remember that?  It was a hundred years ago.”

As we prepare to lay Grannie to rest in Maple Grove Cemetery, across the street from my house in Bath, I remember the times I spent there with her.  She enjoyed walking around the old headstones with me and reading the inscriptions on the bottom.  The morbid ones were especially interesting to her, such as one she pointed out to me: “Remember me as you pass by, for you might be the next to die.  As I am now, so you must be. Prepare for death and follow me.”

On another occasion, she took me to a cemetery in Richmond (I believe) to see a particularly sad set of gravestones.  A 19th-century couple had a son who died in infancy.  Then they had another son, which they gave the same name as the first.  He also died young.  Then a third son followed, then a fourth, and then a fifth.  All had the same first name, all died before the age of 5, and all were buried under a row of identical gravestones.  It was a sobering example of the tragedy that so many families endured before modern medicine.

Grannie also encouraged me to try gravestone rubbing.  I made several attempts, but none turned out very well.  Even so, I developed a true love of old New England graveyards.  When the autumn air is crisp, the colored leaves are carpeting the ground, and the sun’s rays are morning yellow, an old cemetery is one of my favorite places on earth. Where else can you go and see a landscape that has been unchanged for centuries?  Where else can you stand among your ancestors, the people who built the town you live in, and the men who fought in the Revolution and the Civil War?

When I look at an old gravestone, I ponder the life of the person who lived long ago, and the world that they lived in.  What things did they see?  What did they dream about, and what did they talk about?  How long were they thought of, and when did they finally pass from living memory?  When you see the stone of somebody who died young, you ponder the meaning of such a short life.  And finally, you must face your own mortality, think of the precious few years remaining to you, and try to imagine a world where you, too, are just a forgotten name carved into stone.

It will be nice to have old Grannie across the street, where I can walk over and visit her any time.  But I wish she could have stayed longer.