"If people are going to put gravestones on their lawn, as they have done, I hope they are going to do them in good taste," said Linda Malexecutive executive director of the Montclair Counseling Center, who has been working with school and church groups to help them deal with the trauma.
If you'd like to try turning your house into a cemetery, put gravestones throughout your yard.
In the postwar years, I often put up gravestones in cemeteries while working as a stonemason, and once made a deal with a gravedigger: five Lucky Strikes for a good dozen hand-forged coffin nails; later, much later, they appeared as rusty assemblages in drawings, lying this way and that, a few crooked, each with its own shape.
It's only going to twist further and further into the soil and the earth, where we can put a gravestone in it and say its last rites.
They should put on my gravestone that I didn't know what P.T.S.D. was till it was too late for my son".
To my surprise, he had these words put on her gravestone: "A devoted mother and grandmother and dear friend of many, including her former pupils".
My decision to have my gravestone put in at the same time as Carol's, in early August — it only lacks the final numbers — wasn't easy, but has turned out to be comforting, not creepy.
Near the rusting, abandoned steelworks perched on a hill overlooking the forlorn north-eastern town of Gandrange, trade unionists put up a gravestone inscribed: "Here lie the broken promises of Nicolas Sarkozy". The French president, fresh from his whirlwind marriage to Carla Bruni in 2008, had vowed that the state would save the factory and he would come back to help.
"Look, if the legacy of the next four years is that my kids think I'm a great dad… that's not something you put on your gravestone but they're six and three, so they'll be 10 and seven [in four years' time].
Do I want, you know, them to put on my gravestone, "He had a good feel for the market?" No.
Andrew Carnegie wanted to put on his gravestone: "Here lies a man who attracted better people into his service than he was himself".
