The South claims death with as much loyalty as we claim our children. Lest we forget that this all will come to an end some day, each spring we pass cemeteries so bright they would shame an Impressionist painter. Sugarcoating gets a bad rap, but if anyone has found a way to soften the great blow of death, it is Southerners. To die is to trade up to a celestial world that never ends. We own death so it does not own us. You don’t title a novel “As I Lay Dying,” as William Faulkner did, because it sounds sweet or catchy. Death is simply something we all will do.

J.T. Lowery, a former pastor and “roundabout member” at Old Liberty, misses when Decoration Day meant keeping company with headstones during dinner on the ground.

“We’re spoiled by air conditioning now,” he says. Moving festivities inside, “it’s a little more sanitary than it is outside.”

Outside is where Opal Flannigan remembers riding up in her parents’ wagon as a little girl. She drove here from Florence to honor her mother, father, and great-nephew, whose headstones she sat among in a chair with the comfort of a concert goer or movie watcher. She is in her 80s, and she has come to this cemetery each spring since she was 3 weeks old. Even when she and her husband lived in Michigan for 13 years, they came home for Decoration Day. As a child, Flannigan walked the perimeter of the cemetery this day ringing handbells.

“At the end, we had prayer,” she says.

Back then, Decoration Day required meticulous, ritual-like preparation. Her family ate fried chicken and vegetables on the grounds of the cemetery on starched white, embroidered tablecloths. The night before, Flannigan would sit at the kitchen table with her mother twisting crepe paper into roses and mums. They moistened the paper and pinched it, bundling homemade stems together with wire. They made more than 100 flowers at a time.

“Give me the roses while I live and not after I’m dead and gone,” her mother told her as they worked.

Flannigan fears Decoration Day will fade away though her nieces and nephews give her hope.

“The next generations might pick right up,” she says. “You don’t know.”

Her own peace of mind is secondary for coming here.

“You ought to come here for your family,” Flannigan says. “It’s for honoring them. We know they’re not in their graves.”