Dreher on "Unvisited Tombs"

I have been meaning to mention a beautiful post Rod Dreher offered a month ago today. It's a reflection on, of all things, a trip he took to a cemetery with his young son on Mother's Day. It begins:

My mother has a lovely custom of placing candles on the graves of family members in the local graveyard on certain holidays. On Saturday evening, Matthew and I went with her and my dad to the Starhill Cemetery to light candles on the graves of various women in my extended family who had been mothers. It was an occasion for me to visit graves and explain to Matthew who these people were.

In particular, it gave Rod the chance to think about -- to remember -- what a difference these people made in his life. I get the impression that his son wasn't too interested in hearing the stories, but someday he will be. Rod ends by quoting the final line from George Eliot's Middlemarch:

But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

It is a deeply conservative thought, and a deeply humbling one. In a celebrity-obsessed age, when many of us keep current with every jot and tittle of Brad and Angelina's day but know very little about the life stories of our own relatives, it wouldn't hurt for us to spend a bit more time paying our respects at those unvisited tombs.