"This place," I brooded, "all these people... forgotten, all forgotten." The cemetery stretched before me. There were countless fallen tombstones that, by nature's wry sense of either humor or poetic justice, were themselves all but buried beneath matted weeds. And the few monuments yet standing, pockmarked and lichen-encrusted, tottered at crazy angles, their epitaphs long ago eroded into illegibility. Wrapping my cloak more tightly about me as the dead leaves spiraled in the wind, I lifted my eyes from a fallen gravestone and saw the ghost gliding toward me.
"You look like someone lost in grave contemplation," he said with a smile.
I sighed. "Why is it," I thought, "that the worse a ghost is as a comedian, the more it wants one's attention?"
"Oh," I replied, more politely than I wanted to, "my thoughts are not too solemn, not really. But, after all, it is October, when the skies are 'ashen and sober' and the leaves are 'withering and sere,' so a certain small degree of wistfulness isn't to be unexpected. Still, my thoughts are far from melancholy."
His smile betrayed that he didn't believe me. "Even so, one mustn't forget that a time such as this, a place such as this, do seem to sadden one's thoughts."
"Yet you smile."
My attempted barb only made the dead thing chuckle. "Surely you do not think me an irreverent revenant?"
I sighed again. "He has no intention of letting me rest in peace," I thought, and so I changed the subject to something I found quite curious. "What," I asked, "is that structure over that grave? It looks like a cage."
"Oh, that's a mortsafe."
"'Mortsafe'? What is that?"
"Ah! It's been obsolete for some time, so I guess it might be forgotten. Basically, it's a construction to prevent grave robbers from plying their trade. They were somewhat popular in the 1800s."
"The 19th century! But it's only a little rusted. Is it new?"
"Well," smiled the specter, "since its original unsavory purpose is forgotten, it does serve a new function, at least in this place, so it's still being made. Don't you remember?"
"Remember? Remember what?"
Now it was the dead thing's turn to sigh. "You don't remember. They never remember! As I said, originally the mortsafe was a sort of barricade meant to deter the living from defiling the dead. Now, here, it keeps us dead from defiling the living."
"'Us'?" I repeated numbly. "'Dead'?"
"But of course! You, me: the dead. Don't you remember what you are?"
"I... I'm... I don't..."
He took me by the hand and led me to the grave. "You," he said, "are a memory, only a memory now. Your survivors, if they recall you at all, should recall you in sweet memories. Instead, you relentlessly haunt them, my friend. You give them no rest, no peace. You keep digging yourself up and rob them of their present. Instead of being a sweet memory you are a suffocating obsession; and you know that's not right. After all, in memoriam in moderation."
I tried to understand, to remember. "So this structure once protected my body from others, but now..."
"But now?"
My confusion dissipated as all became wonderfully clear. "But now it protects others from me... well, from a morbid clinging to memories of me. It is my time, my place to be only an occasional memory to those on their side of the veil. I remember now!"
And with that realization I climbed on top of the mortsafe and bade the ghost goodbye. He gave me one last smile as I wafted down through the iron grating, down through the heavy iron plate and down into the cold and comforting earth.
