Morning is Coming.
The Morning Is Coming
The Morning Is Coming
I remember going to the cemetery when I was a kid. Mostly it was Woodlawn Cemetery in Lakewood, New Jersey, where we’d “visit” my mother’s father’s side of the family—the Johnsons, almost all of them. What I didn’t know as a child was that my great-grandmother Elizabeth Johnson—who I called Great Nana—was already a Johnson before she married my great-grandfather Benjamin. That name ran through both sides, and yes, it does complicate researching and tracing a family tree. At first glance, if you’re not careful, it could create what looks more like a family shrub than a tree.
My cousin Betsy—who I always called Aunt Betsy—told me that long before I came along, my grandfather Ernest (known to everyone else as Uncle Ernie, but to me he was always “Poppy” as a little boy, and as I grew up he was always “POP”) would load up the car on Memorial Day, bring along a few of the girls—his nieces and my mom and maybe a sister or two—and make a day of tending the graves. Geraniums were the flower of choice. They’d pack lunches and make it an event, placing the bright blooms with care at each grave—first a cemetery, then a churchyard, then another plot—each one remembered.
Nowadays, mostly I see plastic silk flowers. They seem to last longer, but there is no fragrance, and eventually—because they last longer but fade—they start to look trashy unless they’re thrown away. Flags too are put out on Memorial Day and sometimes the 4th of July, on veterans’ graves and for the community volunteers. At the graves of volunteer firemen, bright red flags with gold-stenciled fire department logos are placed. It can make for quite a busy place. But flags fade or are broken, and time moves on and repeats—as it should…
And as time moves on, as it does, some things fade—plastic flowers, frayed flags, even the crowds. But Pop never stopped visiting. And neither did Nana. They didn’t need a holiday to remember. They carried the memory of those they loved into every season.
And so when Nana and Pop were much older and all of the nieces were grown, they would still get my mother and tend a few in Woodlawn or Southard… until one day, on their wedding anniversary in the mid-1980s, my Nana and Pop (Ernest and Grace) decided to get something truly special for each other. It was very expensive, but it was just exactly right… They were so pleased with their gift that they went to show my mom, LannyLou. They picked her up, all excited, saying they had something beautiful to show her—but first, they had to swing by Woodlawn to put out the geraniums and check on the family stones.
Nana was always dressed up, and Pop… well, he was always Pop. Sometimes he would wear a bolo tie, but he always had a nice button-up shirt, even for work… so Mom was in the car, and they could have been going anyplace nice.
As they drove up the main road of the cemetery, Mom was fully persuaded that this was just a pit stop… Pop stopped the car, and he and Nana and Mom got out and started walking. And then Nana pointed: “There it is!” Nana added, “Isn’t it beautiful? It’s rose granite—just like my mother’s.”
But this time, the stone bore their own names. It was a new gravestone with both their names and birth dates already carved into it.
My mom, who was in her late 40s at the time, wasn’t exactly thrilled to see her parents’ future resting place set in stone. At the time, to be honest, Mom was really kind of angry about it—she told me later, laughing as hard as she could.
I can actually recall when this happened—my mother calling me afterward, not very pleased. At the same time, she had to laugh. I think she said something like, “What were they thinking? That I would be happy about this?” She might’ve told a few of the other relatives too. And then, many years later, she told me the whole story—just laughing at the kitchen table as we sat together, watching the birds pick through seeds in the snow through her sliding glass door. But I digress.
The one who really thought it was funny, if I remember correctly, was Nana.
Years later, in early December or late November of 1999, while Nana was in the hospital, she made my mom go back to the cemetery to check something. She was terrified that the death date etched in the stone—only marked “19–”—might have been mistakenly or magically advanced to “20–.”
Mom said, “How would that happen?”
But Nana insisted, and Mom drove out to the cemetery to make sure that gnomes had not somehow changed the date…
Nana was relieved when my mom returned and confirmed it still read “19–.”
She died just before Christmas that year.
Nana knew it was time, I think.
I preached her funeral on December 23, 1999, and later—during a light rain—we drove to the cemetery. As we pulled in, her cousin Billy Addison, an officer with the Lakewood Police Department, was standing in the rain with his bagpipe, playing Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound…
Nana and Pop had been married 54 years.
I still visit their grave, and I still tend to it.
I can still hear the lonely bagpipe play.
It’s good to know I’m not alone. My cousin Mary Lou—yes, the same one from the rabbit hunting stories—tends many of the others at Woodlawn: the uncles, her father and mother, Uncle Ben and Aunt Helen. Uncle Otis is there, and George, Great Nana and her husband Benjamin Sr., and so many others.
Several years ago, I brought some of those old pig iron sandstones to Nana and Pop’s grave as a historical tribute to her great-great-great etc. grandfather John Riley, who was a blacksmith at Allaire Foundry and community (currently Allaire State Park), and I built a small flower bed in front of their monument and planted a few of the hyacinths I dug up from their old home. And instead of geraniums, I planted a miniature rose. One year, I even planted a tomato to honor Pop’s love of gardening. But Mom wouldn’t eat any of them. “It’s just wrong,” she said. I ate them, and it didn’t feel wrong at all, but I never told Mom.
Eventually, though, it was time for me to find a place to bury my mom when she died. And it was going to be soon—she had fallen into a comatose state, and I just could not let her go. I knew she was saved, but it was God who would have to take her to Himself, not me. She had made no plans, so I had to. She left no money except a small life insurance policy to split between me and my sister, along with a letter telling us how sorry she was for not leaving anything—and pleading with us not to fight with each other. I already knew, but it didn’t matter. It’s not about money. My sister and I get along, and family kicked in and made sure all was covered.
When my mom died, everything felt sudden, even though part of me had seen it coming. There were so many questions to answer—the biggest one being: Where should she be laid to rest?
I didn’t have a ready answer. We’d always gone to Woodlawn. That’s where her parents were—Ernie and Grace Johnson—along with nearly all of her uncles and aunts. That was where the geraniums were planted, the tomato that wasn’t eaten, the granite that held more memories than inscriptions. But there were no plots left there—at least none that we owned. Most importantly, there was no place left for her beside them.
Then I remembered Southard.
The Southard Methodist Cemetery—not far from where her ancestors once lived, not far from where so many of them were already resting—held the key. I began looking deeper and found something remarkable: my great-grandfather George Addison, who had two children, had also purchased four plots many decades ago. Two of them had already been used—one for George himself and the other for his wife Viola. Remember, they had two children: one, my Uncle Norman, who is buried in the Methodist graveyard off Hope Chapel Road in Lakewood, and Grace Uda, my grandmother, who was buried at Woodlawn in Lakewood next to her husband Ernest.
That left two unused plots. And they still belonged to the family.
I drafted an affidavit, documenting the lineage and ownership. No one in the family contested it. Everyone understood. It made sense. This was the right place.
So I buried my mother next to her grandparents—next to George and Viola Addison, next to the quiet road that runs through that quiet of Southard Graveyard, where the trees still whisper, and the gravestones still remember. There was no question anymore. This is where she belonged.
Southard is a name on buildings now, incorporated into Howell Township. The plows are gone, and most of the old homesteads have been subdivided, sold, or overtaken by time. A huge Coptic church sits across the street, and a Walmart has taken up all the land that once served as farms. But the churchyard remains—modest, tucked away, not far from where the family once worked and worshiped. It holds not just the remains of those who came before, but the memory of the world they helped shape.
The church that once stood there still stands but is not part of the graveyard anymore—it’s still simple and whitewashed like so many rural Methodist chapels. But back then, it was more than a building. It was the center of life for the community that had endured war, raised barns, buried children, and prayed for rain. It was there that Viola and Lavinia—and even Uda (my Nana)—taught Sunday school, passing on Scripture and songs to the next generation. I believe it was Lavinia, a woman of rare strength and presence, who also became the first female postmistress in the region—trusted with communication, trusted with responsibility. She knew every family by name and every road by feel. I have a photograph with the whole family standing on the porch looking out, and above them the small sign: “Post Office.”
The graveyard beside that old church tells a story written in granite and lichen. Parents named their children Ulysses S. Grant, Longstreet, Jackson, and Fulton—names not chosen lightly, but in honor of the generals and causes they fought for, bled for, and, in some cases, never returned from. Some came home wounded in body and spirit, never quite the same. Some did not come home at all. And some moved on, seeking quieter places to start over or bury the past.
But those who did return, those who chose to stay and stitch themselves back into the fabric of the land—they’re here. Buried among kin, neighbors, and fellow soldiers. You can still trace the line of their lives in the rows of headstones. Some are grand and upright; others are weathered, leaning, almost swallowed by the earth. But they’re still standing. Just like the memory of the church, just like the soil they turned, the hymns they sang, and the promises they believed.
Read the stones. They confess a hope of the resurrection, the promise of heaven, and the rest that only Jesus can provide.
So when I laid my mother there—beside George and Viola Addison—it didn’t feel like an end. It felt like a homecoming. A return not just to family, but to the people who had carried this place through fire and faith. In that quiet corner of Southard, where the trees still whisper and the gravestones still remember, she is not alone.
She is among her own.
And when I bought my mother’s headstone, I found pink granite—not as dark as Viola’s or as light as Grace’s, but still. It’s the little things that see us together sometimes.
And though her body rests in that soil, I know she is not in the darkness of the grave. She is in Christ—the Light of the world, the Resurrection and the Life. The same Jesus who said, “He that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.” She is with Him, where there is no more pain, no more sorrow, no more parting. She has already risen in spirit, and her body, like so many others buried in that ground, waits only for the shout, the trumpet, and the call of God.
Because this cemetery—quiet as it seems—is not a place of forgetting. It is a field of testimony. These gravestones are not just markers; they are witnesses. Many of them speak still—not with audible words, but with names carved in hope, with dates wrapped in grace, with Scriptures chosen by hands that believed in a world yet to come. These are the resting places of those who died in faith—not having received the promise, but having seen it afar off, and embraced it.
And one day, they will rise.
As Paul wrote to the Thessalonians, “The dead in Christ shall rise first… and we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them… and so shall we ever be with the Lord.”
This is not the end of the story. Not for her. Not for any of us who are in Christ.
The trees may whisper, and the stones may weather, but the promises of God stand sure. And in that hope, I laid her down—not in defeat, but in expectation.
Waiting for the morning.
The morning is coming.
