Cemetery Wisdom

While I am not particularly comfortable with the dying, I get along okay with the dead.  I grew up across the street from Covington Memorial Gardens (“Gardens” being a nice euphemism, kind of like “passed away” for died), and spent my childhood climbing on monuments, kissing statues, visiting geese at the pond, and running the mile loop of cracked pavement.  Once, I was sure I saw a guy wearing monk’s robes in the adjacent woods where the cement vaults were stored.

It seems I can’t stay away from burial grounds, as we now live within a mile of two cemeteries.  Within one block, right across from the high school, is St. Mary’s, where the graves are laid out in orderly fashion with mostly gray headstones, some considerably weathered, others shiny, grief newly etched in painstaking lettering.  Flags sprout up in the veterans’ section for Memorial Day and July 4^th.  There is a sense of order and dignity in the luscious green lawn and uniformly shaped markers. 

The second cemetery, Juniper Hill, is about half a mile down our street the other way.  There is a short drive to a wrought iron gate surrounded by a 19^th century stone wall.  The grounds feel, and are, historical.  Stately. But then you see that many of the gravestones are haphazardly strewn about, like boulders in a field.  Large tree roots from junipers and weeping birches compete with markers for space, wood shifting stone. 

When we first moved to Bristol, I was appalled at the condition of the gravestones, many of which were listing sideways, sinking into marshy ground, or crumbling.  Some stone caskets are above ground, and curiosity warred with fear as I investigated inch-wide cracks across the top.  No rotting wood or powdery remains revealed themselves.  I am not sure whether I was more disappointed or relieved.    

This weekend, though, as I walked through the burial ground, alone except for the teenage couple in skinny jeans and punk hair (his was red, hers was green), I appreciated the symmetry of the place.  Instead of graves laid out in solemn rows on flat land as if a farmer or accountant had arranged them, the place felt organic, and—irony aside--alive.  The dogwoods glowed with bright white flowers even on this cloudy April afternoon.  Bouquets of daffodils, tulips, and hyacinth cheered up some gravestones, and shoots of lilies and hostas promised new life for others. 

I came here to visit the magnolias and mourn the weeping birch who lost its best feature in the February blizzard—a long, well-muscled arm of a branch reaching horizontally across the ground.  The branch had been sliced into stacks of fireplace logs next to the caretaker’s home.  I once heard him say this was his favorite tree. 

I wandered among the graves, pausing at some of the inscriptions.  My favorite was for Susanne Robbins DeWolf, 1930-1983.  A sturdy stone bench had been erected in her honor, with the following words:

AN INQUIRING HEART

COURAGE TO WILL AND

SPIRIT TO LOVE

This seemed like the perfect place to pause.  The birds got louder as I got quieter, and the beauty of the place sank in as I contemplated the many souls around me.  The small graves with initials only, the impressive bench on which I sat, the large monuments dedicated to the important people of Bristol, including various Colts (related to Samuel Colt, who invented the Colt .45), DeWolfs (a seafaring family, some of whose wealth came from the triangle trade) and Bradfords (a Rhode Island governor  is in that lineage).  The beauty of this place, though, is not in the shape of the monuments or names and dates faded into stone, but in the allowing of nature and the dead to co-exist with a minimum of interference. 

Does this make Juniper Hill spooky?  Lonely?  Quiet?  Yes, yes, and yes.  But maybe death is a little spooky, lonely, and quiet, for the person being mourned and for the mourners.  I have become reconciled to what I originally saw as carelessness and disrespect for the dead here, the allowing of stone markers to melt into the earth.  Now I see the process of nature unfolding and cracking the human sense of permanence.  If we have what Susanne brought to the world, “an inquiring heart, courage to will, and spirit to love,” then we do not need even a fine stone bench to memorialize our lives and our passing.  It is enough to have lived.