A Second Chance – TT picture prompt

Here’s another snippet from A Second Chance, the prequel to My Wildest Dreams, the first book in A Growing Wings series.
In A Second Chance, Jenny suffered a sudden cardiac arrest and is grappling with a flurry of thoughts and emotions about it. This scene happens after Jenny eludes a coworker’s invitation to lunch and she escapes to one of her favorite lunchtime locations…the local cemetery.

This week we’re writing to a picture prompt. The scenes will be short, 300 words or less, so it will be quick reading. For more fascinating story snippets from the wonderful authors in the group, return to TUESDAY TALES here.

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Something about this old, historic cemetery called to me. With hardly more than a handful of headstones, and just as many large rocks signifying a burial, it sat next to a new housing development of towering McMansions, fenced in but otherwise ignored.

I’ve loved visiting cemeteries for years, long before my cardiac arrest, so that’s not the reason. Cemeteries give me peace. Sitting there, trying to commune with lives past, is soothing to me. At one point in time, these people also walked this earth. They too lived and loved. They provided for a family, protected them, clothed them, they were a member of a community.

Maybe. They could also have been a traveler, a man out to see the world, without a place to call home, following the wind and a dream. Now, what’s left to commemorate their life is a headstone with a time-worn name etched in granite or stone. Sometimes only a half-buried rock or pile of rocks marks a place where a body was once buried. Many gravesites sprout trees or shrubs, sprouting from the place a body was once buried; a plant flourishing, taking nourishment from organic matter that the soul no longer requires.

Many people are cremated and have been scattered to the winds, the sea or the earth. No tangible monument marks the site of their final burial. Fifty or a hundred years from now, no one will stumble across a headstone, rock or tree, marking the site of their last earthly presence.

What memory of my life do I want to remain after I leave this cellular body?

What do I want to leave to the future besides a name etched on a granite stone?

A worthy answer eludes me.