Consecrated Grounds

I
The Online Etymology Dictionary says this about the word cemetery:

late 14c., from Old Frencn cimetiere "graveyard" (12c.), from Late Latin coemeterium, from Greek koimeterion "sleeping place, dormitory," from koiman "to put to sleep," kemai "I lie down," from PIE root *kei- "to lie, rest," also "bed, couch," hence secondary sense of "beloved, dear" 

II
I remember no funeral before my mother's, when I was 16. A gray day in December, chilly, wet. Inside, in the newly constructed church where the altar would be dedicated to her and where her hand-sewn hangings celebrated Advent, hundreds of people gathered, but I didn't see them, seated as we were in the front pew. It wasn't our regular Sunday pew, two rows back, but it served that day. The cemetery was gray, and I remember only the odd sensation of sitting unsteadily on a folding chair, seeming about to give way, balanced on the covering, the ground underneath soft with rain.

III
When I worked for a historic house museum lived in over a span of 100 hundred years, the last fifty or so by members of my own family (including my father), I learned that cemeteries served in the earlier years as parks,  where families gathered to picnic or folks strolled for pleasure. No one gathers at my mother's grave, or my father's, or those others of my family, at least so far as I know. I have been to my parents' graves less than a dozen times.

IV
Here, though, in Sewanee, I wander often through the cemetery (where I knew only a few of the dead). It is separated from the campus only by a low wall, and it's surrounded by dormitories, the library, art studios, even the firehouse. Directly across the street, the University-owned coffeehouse, operated by students under the direction of an adult raised here, serves as the popular campus gathering place for laughter, and gossip, and study, and deep conversation. A Victorian house, cheerfully painted and gingerbreaded, it complements the stones across Georgia Avenue, where sleepers lie and lichen and moss thrive.

V
The living and the dead sleep in close proximity.