As some of you know, lately I've been trying to find out more about an enigmatic, long-dead cousin of mine.


As some of you know, lately I've been trying to find out more about an enigmatic, long-dead cousin of mine. Yesterday I located a photo of his gravestone, and was both puzzled and intrigued by the epitaph. What could it mean?

Comments

  1. Mark HufstetlerJuly 16, 2011 at 2:48 PM

    Yeah, none that I can think of. Merrill was an unpublished poet who spent much of the 60s living in Haight Ashbury ... but he grew up in Utah, and loved the desert country there.

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  2. Dean CalahanJuly 16, 2011 at 3:30 PM

    Do you have copies of his poetry? Maybe desert glass figures in some of them.

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  3. Mark HufstetlerJuly 16, 2011 at 3:54 PM

    Just a couple of things from the Amherst College literary magazine ... but the Utah desert does figure in one of them.

    His death was a suicide, and so I wonder who picked the epitaph. Did he request it, or was it a line one of his siblings chose?

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  4. Felicia ElenaJuly 17, 2011 at 11:48 AM

    Wow. Fascinatingly mysterious.

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  5. Theodore StaufferJuly 17, 2011 at 1:01 PM

    60's living in Haight Ashbury, grew up in Utah? He's possibly talking about the atomic tests in the Nevada and New Mexico deserts, isn't he?

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  6. Mark HufstetlerJuly 17, 2011 at 2:50 PM

    The trinitite thing could actually have something to do with it ... he was of that era, and sensitive to such things. (I have a copy of a letter to the editor he wrote to the local paper in 1963, talking about the horrors of atomic weaponry. I'm sure it scandalized the relatives.)

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  7. Scott MurdockJuly 17, 2011 at 9:03 PM

    I hadn't thought of a trinitite connection. Does the timing of his death tie in with any significant atomic tests?

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  8. Angharod Brown-BairJuly 17, 2011 at 9:12 PM

    Perhaps he felt himself a victim of the atomic age. RIP to him. Was he anywhere near St. George, UT? It was in the 70's when all the cancer deaths from that area was being investigated.. How very sad for the loved ones left behind.

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  9. Angharod Brown-BairJuly 17, 2011 at 9:27 PM

    Where is the headstone located?

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  10. Mark HufstetlerJuly 18, 2011 at 4:54 AM

    I don't think there was probably a geographic tie between his death and the atomic tests, though they may have weighed on his mind. (Though he's buried in Utah, he lived his adult life elsewhere.) Since the guy was a poet, I imagine the symbolism was at a deeper level than that ...

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