ALICE WARD JEFFS
Wife of
WILLIAM Y. JEFFS
BORN
Nov. 4 1832
Died
Sept, 4 1907
MOTHER
As the previous blogpost reported, for nearly a thousand years, artists depicted God as a hand reaching down from the clouds. Such a representation can be found on Alice Ward Jeffs’s gothic-styled white marble gravestone in the Iona Cemetery in Ammon, Idaho. On her marker, the hand coming down from swirling clouds is holding a sheaf of wheat and a sickle.
Wheat’s origins are unknown but is the basis of basic food and a staple in many cultures. Because of wheat’s exalted position as a mainstay foodstuff, it is viewed as a gift from Heaven. Wheat symbolizes immortality and resurrection. But, like many symbols found on gravestones, they can have more than one meaning. For instance, because wheat is the main ingredient of bread, the wheat can represent the Body of Christ in the Eucharist. Wheat can also represent a long life, usually more than three score and ten, or seventy years, as is the case for Alice Ward Jeffs, who was a month shy of her 75th birthday.
The sickle is an ancient farm hand tool dating back thousands of years that was used to harvest cereal grains such as wheat. The sickle was a farm implement to gather the wheat; used in funerary symbolism it represents a “harvesting of souls.” The sickle can be shown alone or coupled with another object—such as a sheaf of wheat or with the Grim Reaper, himself!
Gravely Speaking 