Saying Goodbye to Daisy
October 6th in Searles, Alabama, carries a very specific kind of heat. It isn’t the oppressive, wet blanket of mid-July that leaves you gasping for air before you even make it to your car, but rather a slow, lingering warmth that bakes the red clay and draws a dry, pine-scented haze out of the trees. It’s the kind of afternoon that feels suspended in time, which was fitting, considering we were gathered on a hill to lay the matriarch of the Sellers family to rest.
Daisy had turned ninety-nine just a couple of months back. In these parts, reaching ninety-nine isn’t just surviving; it’s an act of gentle defiance against ninety-nine years of dust, humidity, and the steady march of time.
Her homegoing was a proper, traditional Old Southern Funeral. They had done the visitation the night before—a marathon of handshakes, hushed whispers in carpeted halls, and dark suits—leaving today strictly for the Graveside Service and Interment.
To get to Antioch Missionary Baptist Church, you have to drive way out into the heart of open-pit coal mining country. The landscape out here tells a long story of human persistence and heavy diesel machinery. Once upon a time, the church and its surrounding graveyard sat down in the lowlands, what everybody around here just calls the “bottoms.” But coal country doesn’t stay still for long. Over the decades, massive draglines carved up every square foot of the surrounding earth, scooping out the coal seams deep below and backfilling the hollows with the churned-up remains of the countryside.
Through this industrial alchemy of strip pits and land reclamation, Antioch Missionary Baptist was gradually elevated. The ground was dug out from all around it and piled back up, so that today, the church and its grave markers sit high on a plateau, standing proud and isolated above the reshaped earth below. It’s an strange sort of poetry: a sacred place elevated not by nature, but by iron, diesel, and sheer tonnage of moved earth.
The setup at the gravesite followed a ceremony as rigid and understood as any high church liturgical rite. There was the obligatory green canvas funeral home tent, anchored down against the ridge wind, and the familiar row of padded folding chairs. Per long-standing tradition, the grave had been excavated along an east-to-west axis, with the family chairs set up on the north side.
Then came the little detail that only someone who has spent enough time watching these proceedings would catch.
When the director and his crew placed the casket over the vault equipment, they realized the hinges were facing the wrong way relative to the audience. If you set the casket down strictly aligned for its final descent, the lid opens away from the family, leaving everyone staring at the wood backing rather than the subject of the viewing. To let folks pay their respects, they had to flip the orientation for the service. It meant that once the final prayer was said, the amen faded, and the crowd began to wander off, a couple of men in dark suits would have to carefully lift and rotate the casket one hundred and eighty degrees so Daisy would be facing the right way for the long haul. It was a minor, quiet absurdity—the kind of practical hiccup that happens when human geometry meets solemn ritual—and I think Daisy would have gotten a subtle kick out of it.
The preacher stepped up under the shade of the green canopy, pulling out his folded, handwritten notes. You can always tell when a preacher is reading off a generic script for someone he barely met on Tuesday, but that wasn’t the case today. He spoke of Daisy in a tone that let you know he actually knew her, sat on her porch, and genuinely cared about the soul that had just departed and the eternity she was now facing with her Lord and Savior. His words were simple, honest, and grounded in the dirt beneath our shoes.
Alongside the preacher and the folksinger providing the traditional hymns, there was an uncredited backing choir: thousands of cicadas perched in the nearby pine tops. Under the warm autumn sun, their rhythmic, vibrating drone filled the pauses between spoken prayers. Combined with the song leader’s acoustic guitar, it created a surprisingly peaceful backdrop—a blend of human voices and the wild sound of an Alabama afternoon, all singing the praises of my grandmother.
Antioch’s cemetery is one of the old ones, holding onto its character despite the changing world around it. The headstones here are high, carved slabs of marble and granite that stand tall above the grass. None of those modern, low-to-the-ground flush bronze markers that make a graveyard look like an golf course fairway so the lawnmower can zip through without slowing down. These stones demand you walk around them, read the carved script, and respect the space they occupy.
Some things, though, have yielded to progress. The old wooden outdoor tables that used to sit near the treeline for Decoration Days are long gone, replaced by a climate-controlled fellowship hall built down near the parking area. Sitting inside under fluorescent lights and air conditioning is certainly more comfortable on an August afternoon, but standing there on the ridge, I found myself missing the outdoor fellowship of my childhood—the long wooden tables bowed under the weight of glass casserole dishes, fried chicken, and potato salad, with the breeze rolling off the timber.
And then, sitting just past the tree line at the edge of the grave site, was the element nobody speaks about during the eulogy, but everyone notices anyway: a yellow Caterpillar backhoe, parked quietly with its bucket rested on the dirt, waiting for us to finish.
It has become a permanent staple at modern graveside services—a mechanical necessity that everyone agrees to pretend isn’t there. It sits like an uninvited guest who arrived early for the hard labor. Seeing that heavy machine idling on the reclaimed soil made me realize it’s been a very long time since I saw a wooden frame template used to measure out a hand-dug grave with picks and shovels. Time, like the draglines that raised this hill, changes all things eventually.
When the final hymn drifted off into the pine trees and the preacher offered his closing benediction, the spell broke, and people began the slow dispersal.
The walk back to the church building offered a couple of choices. Some folks took the long, winding stroll right through the maze of high headstones, stepping over footstones and reading the names of cousins, neighbors, and long-gone church members as they went. Others chose the easier, smoother path, walking the gravel road that loops around the perimeter of the plot.
It didn’t much matter which path anyone took. Out here on the hill, whether you cut straight through the middle of the markers or stick to the high road on the outside, it all leads to the exact same place in the end.