I spent an hour at a cemetery, rereading poems about a dead president, like something straight out of The Catcher. Once I got past the surrealism, it was an incredibly interesting experience.

I spent most of my time just wandering through the yard, reading names and dates. I kept wondering about their stories: everyone has one. Everyone. Lots of people's lives are cut short, infants and teenagers and middle aged men: people in love and people still grieving the loss of others.

Since the cemetery is so old, there were so many people that were clearly involved in any of the wars of the past few centuries, but that didn't strike me until the third time I passed a seventeen or eighteen year old man's grave, beside his widow, who'd outlived him by a good forty years.

Walt Whitman, in another poem dedicated to Lincoln, wrote that "This dust was once a man," and it just kept bringing me back to their stories. What kind of men were they? What kind of women did they love? Were the family people?

As soon as we stop remembering that everyone exists -- with the same complexity we imagine in ourselves -- we lose our reverence, both for the dead and for the living others. For the living, we forget to treat everyone the way the deserve, the way Jesus would have treated them, and for the dead, we bury them away, and only think about them when we superstitiously hold our breath when we drive past.

Maybe this is how it should be – let the dead bury their dead – but shouldn’t the living also remember the dead? In what is arguably Whitman’s most famous poem, Song of Myself, Whitman described his lineage in a short line.

Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their parents the same.

We come from such rich history, and now we exist, holding the current spot in time like the marker in a relay race, and someday we will have passed it on, and our descendents will tell our stories to their children or we may not leave any worth telling, and they will pass our cemeteries, holding their breath for superstitions sake.