Caring For Your Headstone

Tips For Keeping Your Family Memories Alive In A Cemetery For Years

Tragic though they are by nature, headstones can be a thing of beauty. So caring for your headstone is an important consideration. Headstones stand out with marble, granite, or bronze in stark contrast to the green grass of a cemetery lawn. Surely then we owe it to our loved ones to ensure that they forever stay that way.

The first step to caring for your headstone is simply choosing a durable material that is likely to survive against the elements, which, it is well to remember, will sometimes come at it fiercely. Even still, it would not be wise to assume that strong rock alone is all that is necessary when it comes to caring for your headstone. You must also make sure that it is kept clean as well.

If your loved one has a marble or granite headstone, caring for your headstone means occasionally going by the cemetery to clean it with a bleach solution of 50% bleach, and 50% water. Then spread it around with a paper towel. After you let it set for about 30 minutes, wash it with plain water to clear away all of the soap foam. If the departed has a bronze headstone, you should make sure that your salesman sells you one that has the right percentage of metals to provide a lasting finish. There are also special, and fairly inexpensive cleaning kits you can get when caring for your headstone.

In either case, it is well to remember that your loved one’s life well lived deserves better than a headstone covered with dirt, mildew, rust, white rings, or acid trapped in the stone. Caring for your headstone means making sure these things never happen, and when they do to fix the problem soon. For that matter, if you have not recently been to your loved one’s grave, perhaps it is time to go by there, to make sure that the elements have not had their way with your loved one’s headstone.

Recently, a whole cottage industry has grown around caring for and restoring old headstones, sometimes of those whose relatives have all passed on as well. Whole teams of people are working hard to restore headstones from the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Caring for these headstones is proving to be more challenging than modern headstones, since many of them were made with weaker stones. For example, slate and sandstone were both extremely popular from the 1650s through the early part of the 20th century, but have proved very difficult to care for. Not only can the words tend to blur together, they also have an annoying tendency to fade into the stone. Nonetheless, hundreds of these headstones have been recovered to something like their original appearance.

This makes a certain degree of sense, since caring for those headstones could be one of the only connections still available to that person’s history. Perhaps historians will want to know when that person lived or died for their research. Caring for your headstone can be one of the best things you do for those who did so much for you.