Our present-day experiences of illness and the loss of loved ones differs from the experiences of those in the 19th century. For example, in 1840, there were no mortuaries or funeral directors in the United States. Mortality was a common fact of everyday life during Jerusha’s lifetime.

It is not known what Jerusha thought about her illness and impending death. We do not have any journal entries from her final months or letters written to friends. However, we know that Jerusha gave some thought to her death and how she wished to be remembered due to the large monument that sits in Wadsworth Cemetery in Sudbury. Jerusha left instructions for her burial and monument to her executor, younger brother Adam Jr. Jerusha was not buried with a simple gravestone. A large marble monument stands where she is buried, drawing attention away from her siblings’ simple gravestones.

The type of gravestone, its decoration, and inscription lend some insight into Jerusha’s attitude towards death. Jerusha’s monument reflects two styles of American gravestones: Urn and Willow (1780-1850), and Monumentalism (1840-1920). The Urn and Willow first appeared in the late 18th century and became dominant in the early 19th century. The motif was so popular that it showed up in other forms of art, including needlework and painting. The Urn and Willow style represents mourning. Jerusha’s monument does not feature a willow but includes an urn at the top of a large obelisk and a carving of a rose, symbolizing an individual cut down before their time.

In the earlier part of the 19th century, mortality was a common fact of daily life. The garden cemetery

movement increased in popularity around the 1830s with burials shifting from utilitarian graveyards to planned burial spaces that were rural in nature, landscaped, and beautifully maintained, “not just theaters

for increasingly private funerals but for new rituals of memorial visiting that went along with increasingly elaborate mourning” (Larkin, 104). Monumental gravestones (1840-1920) reminded people not of the general fact of mortality, but remembrance of the individual’s past life along with mourning. Through originality and sheer size, the stone calls attention to itself and to the person it represents. Jerusha’s monument is a mixture of mourning and remembrance. Jerusha died fairly young from tuberculosis and was “cut down” before her time. The monument mourns her death but is also erected in eternal remembrance.

The mid-19th century saw the emergence of the rural cemetery movement. The first rural cemetery in the United States was Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1831. The movement mirrored changing attitudes toward death. “Amid beautiful foliage and rustic environment the old gloom surrounding death would disappear. The dead would now receive appropriate respect in a serene burial site" (Jackson). An evolving attitude towards cemeteries saw individuals enjoying a serene environment in which to remember their loved ones. In a letter to Jerusha two weeks before her death, friend Sarah T. Chaplin wrote:

“I have often thought of our visit to the burial ground in Sudbury, when I was up in September – there lay some of my ancestors, all unconscious of the footsteps of a descendent about their quiet resting place and on whom frailty is stamped in as certain characters as on them. I love to wander over these places of the dead, and so do you if I am not mistaken. When in New Haven a month since, I arose very early one morning and I sauntered out to find the burial-ground I had heard so much of – of a truth it was a city of 'whited sepulchres' – for a light fall of snow in the night had covered the ground, and presented but a slight contrast with the pure marble which told the history of gone generations.”