The floating cross

When we stopped at Holy Trinity Cemetery in Newport Township last week to locate my great-grandparents's grave, something unusual caught my eye, something that I decided I would have to follow up on later. Just a few rows away, a cross appeared to be floating over the cemetery.



It wasn't, of course. Instead it looked like an elegant solution to a problem: a cross had broken at the bottom, and was now supported by a wire frame that preserved the remnants of the original but kept the shape of the original. But thinking about it a bit more, I realized that wasn't the case.

  

What was holding up the cross was actually the wire frame on which the cross - a home-made grave marker - had been built.

The base of the cross had been broken off, or dissolved away from exposure to acid rain over the decades. How many decades? It was impossible to tell - just as it was impossible to tell for whom the cross was intended to serve as a memorial.

The cross has broken glass of several colors incorporated into it, or pressed onto the surface.

Perhaps eighty or ninety years ago someone died and was buried. Someone else cared enough to build a wire frame and pour a cross of concrete around it, carefully incorporating colorful bits of broken glass into it. Now, the cross is breaking down, the name of the person it honors lost to history, or buried in the annals of the Holy Trinity Cemetery. But for the moment it remains hanging on a wire frame above the surface of the cemetery, a testament to the love of the builder for the person buried here.