One day a few years back, one of my friends phoned looking for me. My daughter picked up and informed Sue that, "Mom's hanging with the dead again." I have to admit, she's probably given the best definition of my line of work that I've ever seen.

It's an odd way to make your living, chasing down dead folks so people can construct a family tree. It's certainly not what I planned to do when I left journalism school with my freshly minted B.A. and sailed off to what I thought would be my life time career as a journalist. But life's like that, don't you find?

Nothing quite brings home the concept of "ashes to ashes, dust to dust" like having an old grave collapse under you in an abandoned cemetery.

One moment you're writing down the particulars of a gravestone, the next moment the ground under you has dropped 18 inches in the perfect rectangle of what was once probably a plain, six foot long pine box. Oh my.

My oddest experience was an afternoon in a small village cemetery. Out of nowhere a wolfhound materialized. At first he kept a respectful distance, but gradually he edged closer and closer until he was actually leaning sideways against me.

Every time I shifted over to the next stone he would half topple, recover, and then edge over and lean on me again. All efforts to convince him that I was not a public leaning post failed miserably. I can't imagine how we must have looked to folks driving by.

I have indexed over 28,000 gravestones now. I read that number and I can't quite believe it, but that's what the counter on my database program says.

Mostly the stones are just a jumble of names, dates, and numbers that I record on my clipboard, and later type into my database. But sometimes ... sometimes people leave behind words of loss so powerful that I have to set down my stuff and have a little weep.

Let's just keep that our little secret, 'kay?