What is The Silent Sod?
A newsletter about history, memory, and meaning.
While our physical time on earth is limited to a century or so, our memory can live on much longer if it’s maintained by the living. What the living do with our memory, though, is largely out of our control after death. The Silent Sod is a newsletter that examines this tension using historical examples and personal reflections.
More questions will be asked than answered.
Who writes The Silent Sod?
Hi, it’s us, Sarah and Charlotte! We’re sisters who grew up in Cincinnati, share a passion for history, and have been fortunate enough to travel together. Here we are in Venice, Italy:
While Sarah has played many roles over the course of her life, the ones most relevant for this endeavor are that she spent four years as a cemetery tour guide at Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta and eight years in academia studying mortality trends and estimation, first as a graduate student in demography at UC Berkeley and then as a postdoctoral researcher at UW Madison and Emory University. Currently, she’s a Western Massachusetts based writer working on a fiction project that deals with themes of family memory and what we owe the dead.
Charlotte's passion for history was ignited during a summer archaeological research program in Giecz, Poland, which she took part in while completing her undergraduate degree in Anthropology at the University of Cincinnati. Char loves reading historical non-fiction, the bigger the book the better, and searching archives to solve mysteries from the past. Her special areas of interest include anything related to the Titanic and more recently US presidential history.
When will you hear from us?
Two times per week.
Sometimes this might be a personal story about memory, other times we might share something we’ve learned in our historical research or seen during our travels.
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What’s with the name The Silent Sod?
Sarah first saw this phrase inscribed on a grave. It was part of a short poem addressed to the deceased. Here’s an excerpt:
Yet how soon we too may follow, In the path that you have trod. And our bodies too will molder, Underneath the silent sod.
Recently, she found the phrase again in a poem called The Crocuses by Frances Ellen Watkins, a nineteenth century poet, novelist, and abolitionist. Watkins writes about crocuses, the first flowers of spring, which bloom even before other early bloomers like snow-drops. Here’s an excerpt:
While the snow-drops still were sleeping
Beneath the silent sod;
They felt their new life pulsing
Within the dark, cold clod.Whether decay is happening or new life is forming, the sod is silent, caught between the memories of what came before, of the dead who can speak no more, and the potential future, flowers that will bloom for a season.
We’re curious about what can we discover in the silence.
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