After working in cemeteries for as long as I have, I sometimes feel like I have heard it all. Or at least everything strange that people believe about them. I was wrong. Apparently, there is such a thing as a Church Grim. In old English and Scandinavian folklore, the Church Grim was a supernatural guardian of a church and its graveyard. Its job was to protect the grounds from thieves, vandals, witches, demons, and, in some versions, the Devil. That is a lot to keep up with. I

Oakwood gives grief somewhere to go, memory a home, and history a place to stand. W. H. Auden’s poem Funeral Blues gives voice to something many people understand: when someone we love dies, it feels as if the whole world ought to stop. The phones should quiet. The traffic should still. The errands, calendars, chores, and ordinary worries of life should step aside, because one family’s world has changed forever. But the world rarely cooperates. The sun rises. The mail runs. T

In the days since Dolly Parton died on August 25, 2026, her music has been everywhere. Radio stations have played it. Television shows have revisited it. Friends and admirers have shared favorite songs, stories, performances, and, of course, Dolly quotations—an activity that could keep the nation occupied for some time. All that music sent me back to one of my own favorite Dolly recordings, though not one most people immediately associate with her. It is not “Jolene,” “Coat o

The story we tell ourselves is that life and death are opposites. That makes sense to me. Our minds like firm categories: black and white. Life on one side, death on the other, a crisp line separating the two. Very civilized. A tree complicates our story. The oak in your yard is alive, of course. But not simply so. Its leaves are busy. Its roots are reaching. Sapwood is carrying water upward. Phloem moves the sugars produced by photosynthesis. Just under the bark, the cambium

Each fall, Oakwood Cemetery becomes one of the best places in Waco to hear a good story. This October, Oakwood Cemetery & Arboretum will again welcome the Heart of Texas Storytelling Guild for Walking Tales on Saturday, October 17, 2026, one of our favorite traditions and one of the most engaging ways to experience Waco history where so much of it rests. The event will be held from 10:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. on the grounds of Oakwood Cemetery. For those who have never attended,

In August of 1976, a young man arrived at Oakwood Cemetery looking for work. He was fifteen years old, although he was apparently somewhat less forthcoming about that particular detail when he filled out his application. Age undisclosed; job acquired. It was a good decision. This year, Joe Cervantez celebrates fifty years at Oakwood—nearly one-third of the cemetery’s entire history. He has now spent most of his life here, and there is very little about Oakwood as it exists to

Long before it became a cemetery, the land that is Oakwood today was home to a fairground and racetrack south of Waco. By the 1870s, the city’s older burial grounds were running out of room, and Waco needed a new cemetery. In 1878, the City purchased 49.5 acres of the former fairgrounds for $4,000 and began laying out cemetery lots, walks, and drives. The first reported burial took place on October 23, 1878, when three-year-old Rose Scott Parrott was laid to rest in what was

There are some people in Oakwood Cemetery whose stories seem almost too large for one lifetime. Dr. Carl Lovelace was one of them. Born in Missouri in 1876, Lovelace arrived in Texas as a boy when his family settled first in Burleson County, then Milam County, before finally making their home in Waco. By the late 1890s, he was part of a rising generation of young Baylor graduates looking outward toward a rapidly changing world. And then, almost immediately after graduation, t

Most people come to Oakwood looking for someone. A parent. A spouse. A grandparent. A familiar name etched into granite. But Oakwood has a way of quietly redirecting your attention. You arrive searching for a person and leave wondering about a symbol carved into the side of a monument… or a stone hand reaching out from a century ago… or why so many obelisks seem to rise above the landscape like frozen prayers. And once you begin noticing those things, it becomes very difficul

Most people come to Oakwood in moments that matter deeply — times of loss, remembrance, and reflection. That’s never lost on us. But every now and then, an idea comes along that doesn’t take anything away from those moments — it simply offers another way to think about this place and what it represents. A while back, Neil deGrasse Tyson — the kind of scientist who can talk about the universe and somehow make it feel both enormous and oddly personal — made an observation about