A peculiar graveyard lives on the misty hill behind my house. It’s not a family graveyard, if that’s what you’re wondering. We moved here when I was little, and the house had been empty for years before that. The names are all different too, so I don’t know what to make of it. It’s a small piece of history that doesn’t make much sense.

What makes it peculiar is the epitaphs—they’re supposedly the final words of the dead. It sounds poetic, but I find it rather unsettling.

Take Patricia Fitzgerald, for instance. Her tombstone says, “I love you. Say it back.” Who was she speaking to? Did he tell her that he loved her?

Then there’s Henry Gumm. He must have been a brave soul. “Not today, Satan,” he said. I guess he was wrong.

One stone has no epitaph. It stands in the middle of the graveyard guarded by a frozen angel. Nothing is written on the stone but the name—Dietrich Müller. Erosion has nothing to do with it. The words just aren’t there.

I’ve thought too much about those missing words. He must have said something throughout his entire life before passing away. Could he really have no final words, nothing at all with which to mark his gravestone? Perhaps he never learned to speak, or was mute from birth. Maybe he was a monk, sworn to secrecy and silence. Or maybe Dietrich Müller never uttered his first words. It wasn’t that he couldn’t or wouldn’t speak some day, but that some day was a place he never reached. I never marked how small his plot was next to the others, and I never will. The view from my window is good enough for me these days. I do think about his stone every day, though.

I wonder what mine will look like some day.