On Sunday night and Monday this week I travelled to North Manchester, Indiana to inter my father’s ashes in the Pleasant Hill Cemetery. North Manchester is the town where my dad grew up, where he and my mother met in high school and where they both attended college. When I was a kid, growing up in Massachusetts, we would come here occasionally and visit my father’s parents in a local nursing home. They are now buried in a plot close to my father’s, and adjacent to the cemetery is the church where my father’s parents first met.
One thing that is poignant about this cemetery is the many gravestones with the name Frantz. Not a common name in most places, it is common in North Manchester and there is even a Frantz hardware store in town. Aside from my father’s parents and grandparents, one of his sisters is buried there as well. Two of her children, my cousins, joined us for the ceremony. For the headstone, we decided to carve into it an outline of a different place far away: a pair of mountains called the Bubbles in Acadia National Park, Maine. This is the spot where my father and stepmother were married. My family spent a lot of time there and we return there still: I consider Acadia my spiritual home.
A sense of home and belonging is a powerful thing. My dad left his boyhood home right after college and moved to Boston. He eventually met my stepmother and connected deeply with Maine. But he was clear that he wished to be buried here in North Manchester. From the times we visited over the years I can find my way to the house on North Sycamore Street that my dad’s father built. But I can’t remember all the stories my dad would tell about other places in town. It has never been my home…yet I belong there.
At the graveside we read a passage from my dad’s favorite author, Thomas Wolfe. We sang a favorite John Denver song and shared a few memories. My sisters and I then lowered the urn into the grave, and sprinkled soil on it—returning him to Mother Earth. In the words of the popular song—which I can still hear him singing as he was driving our old blue van across the state line—my father is finally “back home again in Indiana.”
PRAYER:
Spirit of Love and Life,
May we all find the place that we call home.
May we all have a sense of belonging.
May we know that we are connected to the ancestors who came before us, to the ones with whom we have shared love in this life, and to the ones who will come after us.
Blessed be.
Rev. Drew Frantz
October 28, 2025
One thing that is poignant about this cemetery is the many gravestones with the name Frantz. Not a common name in most places, it is common in North Manchester and there is even a Frantz hardware store in town. Aside from my father’s parents and grandparents, one of his sisters is buried there as well. Two of her children, my cousins, joined us for the ceremony. For the headstone, we decided to carve into it an outline of a different place far away: a pair of mountains called the Bubbles in Acadia National Park, Maine. This is the spot where my father and stepmother were married. My family spent a lot of time there and we return there still: I consider Acadia my spiritual home.
A sense of home and belonging is a powerful thing. My dad left his boyhood home right after college and moved to Boston. He eventually met my stepmother and connected deeply with Maine. But he was clear that he wished to be buried here in North Manchester. From the times we visited over the years I can find my way to the house on North Sycamore Street that my dad’s father built. But I can’t remember all the stories my dad would tell about other places in town. It has never been my home…yet I belong there.
At the graveside we read a passage from my dad’s favorite author, Thomas Wolfe. We sang a favorite John Denver song and shared a few memories. My sisters and I then lowered the urn into the grave, and sprinkled soil on it—returning him to Mother Earth. In the words of the popular song—which I can still hear him singing as he was driving our old blue van across the state line—my father is finally “back home again in Indiana.”
PRAYER:
Spirit of Love and Life,
May we all find the place that we call home.
May we all have a sense of belonging.
May we know that we are connected to the ancestors who came before us, to the ones with whom we have shared love in this life, and to the ones who will come after us.
Blessed be.
Rev. Drew Frantz
October 28, 2025
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