Dying to get in December 6, 1985

 

The “in-thing” these days appears to be cemeteries.

I don’t mean the old joke about people dying to get in. I mean, their fascination with the past.

There has always been a few who have dedicated themselves to the past, but not so many as there are now, caught up with the concept of our own mortality.

The dusty old stones stand as monuments to people many of us do not know, and grow rarer as we run out of space, and people either get buried in above ground tombs or just let their bodies get incinerated to hang out on someone’s shelf or get scattered in some public space.

The dates on the tombstones stretch back sometimes to before even the birth of the nation, promising a strange kind of immorality that the older stones lack – names on sandstone so faded we no longer can tell who they are or when they died, only knowing the time period by the type of stone used.

And still, strolling along these quiet paths, I get the sense of awesome power of infinity, similar to the feeling I got a few summers ago when I was up at Lake Hopatcong at Ritchie’s house and saw Saturn and Jupiter through the telescope for the first time – Jupiter with three of its moons visible, Saturn with its glorious rings.

I kept thinking, “So they weren’t lying after all? Those things really exist?”

And the fact that I could access these things without being dependent on some other higher power, thrilled me.

I understand how Galileo must have felt, hard evidence with which to resist the awesome political powers of his time, feeling independently powerful because he had real knowledge.

Seeing those planets as with seeing these gravestones makes me feel small in this giant universe. With a grave, we get to see the entire span of a human life reduced to two numbers, birth and death. And yet, by having your name carved into stone, you get a bit of immortality that future generations of scattered ashes may not enjoy.

I used to cut school and hide in the graveyard across the street from my house as a kid, or to get out of going to church on Sundays. There was a small house just inside the gate – meant as a waiting area – long gone now – but almost immortal then, resembling some Greek or Roman home. It had no windows or doors, constructed of marble with small columns holding up the roof, as chilling as the graves themselves with benches of stone on either side. It was always empty, often strewn with empty bottles, yet somehow to me felt closer to God than church did, and was out of the elements, protection against the snow or rain. From the glassless windows I could read the names of some of the dead, the most recent since the older graves were located deeper in, down in the darker sections of the graveyard where I sometimes also wandered, from the concrete wall along Lakeview Avenue to the spiked fence near the highway.

Then, one day I stopped going. I think this may have been because of my grandfather’s death – the first real death to hit me hard (although his sister Eglina had died two years prior to his), and I cried at his gravesite down at the far end in the Catholic section.

Maybe I lost my faith because of that, or in my believe in immorality, or perhaps just saw my own fate looming over me and scared that during one trip to this place I might stumble on a stone with my name and those two dates on it, defining my life as well.

 1985 Menu


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