A Matter of Life and Death
My fondness for strolling through cemeteries
A suburb appears to be a nice place to take a walk—you have neither the noise, the hustle and bustle, the hurry, the panic, the honking traffic, the swarming streets, the assaulting odors of the city’s concrete jungle, nor do you have the isolation, vastness, insects, animals, and dirt of the countryside, and so you may indulge your appetite for nature without wandering too far afield from your fellow man and the comforts of civilization. It is the perfect blend of the two, the ideal compromise—in theory. For when something tries to combine the best of two opposites, it very often resolves into a bland middle and brings out the worst. You see, I have been—by force, not by choice—these past many years a habitual suburb-walker, and though I have greatly enjoyed my daily romps in this venerable American institution, I must concur with the kids: I do need more “enrichment in my enclosure.”
A city’s commotion is also color, excitement, interest, stimulation; repose, relaxation, open air, and beauty are what the countryside shelters within its rolling expanses. Along with the city rose up the idea of the flâneur—the louche man of leisure who lolled about on corners (we needn’t tell you why the flâneur was not often imagined as the female flâneuse, of course, for a woman standing alone on a street corner often carried a whiff of, shall we say, other connotations), taking in the street scene, gazing up at the skyscrapers, smoking a cigarette, unfurling a newspaper, proffering his hat to Mrs. — as she bustled into one of those newfangled inventions, the department store, to buy a pair of shoes or some ribbons. In the country, rural lads and lasses could gambol over green meadows and fields of flowers, over river and fen and dale, up mountain and down valley in search of the Wordsworthian sublime, and very often find it. But who can be a true practitioner, an ardent disciple of the art of flânerie in the suburbs, when lolling would arouse, at the very least, suspicion, and, at most, ire and a call to the police, in one’s neighbors? And who can revel in the full height of nature’s glory here, when everything has made its concession to the will of man, and cannot flower again as it did in our once “happy rural seat of various view”?1
Anyway, there would be no point to flâneuring in the suburbs, where all you have are a few houses, repeated as variations on a theme, and people, too, culled from a limited range of human specimens. And there would be no point in expecting to hear more than a tinny rendering of nature’s symphony, for trees serve here only as gentle ornaments to the houses, and flowers bloom merely as “pretty maids all in a row.” Wander and wander, and you will only run into a school, a park, a postbox, a playground. Even if you do reach some sort of town center, where there are shops and people, it is small, and before long you will know it well, and there will be no other to turn to. Find a trail that lures with promise of wilderness, amble and ramble in an air of serene contemplation, but very soon it will all be over, and before you know it you will be unceremoniously ejected once more into the houses and cars and dog-walkers.
All this was turning about vaguely in my mind one day when I decided to do the unthinkable and cross the threshold into the one place I had been expressly forbidden from entering—the local cemetery. “Like Laudomia,” writes Italo Calvino, “every city has at its side another city whose inhabitants are called by the same name: it is the Laudomia of the dead, the cemetery.”2 In this city of the dead, I could at last be a flâneuse of gravestones and mausoleums; no resident could scold me for staring too long or regard me with suspicion for lingering and loitering. But here, too, was a place of repose and calm, of trees and flowers and open sky, where nature was allowed to breathe a little, where the Wordsworthian sublime was not only possible at last but something I myself ascended to more than once.
Now, when I tell people about the pleasures of walking in the cemetery, they are either able to relate, or at least able to conceive that such pleasures do indeed exist (the minority), or they look at me aghast, their eyes widening with horror, suppressing, sometimes, a small shudder of revulsion (the majority). My parents would often tell me not to go there; when I came back from walks they would make me affirm again and again that I indeed had not. Was it because they feared that the usual threats (kidnapping, rape, murder, etc.) were far more possible in this place set off from houses and neighbors and traffic? Or was it something vaguer and deeper, an instinctual dread of death, a premonition that somehow those slumbering beneath the earth would wake once more, that an icy hand would reach out suddenly, grab an ankle, and pull one down into endless darkness?
The first “rural” or “garden” cemetery, Mount Auburn Cemetery, was created in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1831, when a doctor, Jacob Bigelow, became concerned that overcrowded church graveyards posed a danger to public health. Setting off a string of rural cemeteries across the country, Mount Auburn was situated on 72 acres3 of farmland and, with the efforts of the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, landscaped with a wide variety of trees and flowers, ponds, clearings, pathways, woodlands and wetlands. I visited Mount Auburn two years ago, and was delighted to find a larger version of my own beloved haunt—larger and more storied, what with its generations of Boston Brahmins, its venerable old statues of New England greats, its Grecian memorial of Mary Baker Eddy, temple-esque and contemplative in white granite, its noble Hunnewell obelisk, its patient stone sphinx biding her time.
Rural cemeteries were a contrast to burying traditions of the past. I remember visiting the Vatican Necropolis and the catacombs along the Via Appia in Rome and feeling claustrophobic in these dark, airless places, as well as sad for the dead, so far removed from the delights of sun and sky and breeze and birdsong and greenery they must have loved in life. In ancient Egypt, funerary practices revolved around the afterlife—something that always seemed mysterious, esoteric, otherworldly, and very far away to me. In Massachusetts itself, I have often walked by the Granary Burying Ground or the King’s Chapel Burying Ground with a sense of pity for all these little headstones crammed in together like teeth, never mind that one of them may have been for John Winthrop or Samuel Adams or Benjamin Franklin’s parents.
“We ought not to draw such a line of separation between those who are living in this world, and those who are alive in another,” wrote writer and women’s rights activist Lydia Maria Child in 1831. A preoccupation with death is morbid, creepy, and indicates perhaps an acute case of melancholia, but to shy away from any hint of it, to back away in fear and revulsion, shutting one’s eyes—is that not equally blameworthy? When I walk through my local cemetery and come across a woman whose birth year was in the late 1800s and whose life spanned almost the whole of the 20th century, I marvel at the changes she must have seen and the wild transformations she must have experienced—how did she cope, how did she adjust, was it hard for her, or simply something that seemed normal, gradual, woven into the fabric of everyday life? When I pause to calculate the difference between the dates of death of a husband and wife, I wonder whether the one who outlived the other thought of them often in the lonely years, whether to join them in death came as a relief, as the union of two souls joining ever and in perpetuum.
These contemplations are not morbid to me, for I love to imagine the lives of others and particularly the lives of those who lived long ago. The names themselves are evocative, as are the dates; sometimes there is an inscription, or even an image, and you begin to realize how many of us there are and have been, and how each of those lives is so rich in itself, containing so many infinitesimal moments and experiences and nuances of individual emotion. In its overall arc, a life may be good or bad, but it is always interesting. There is no life that does not deserve at least an ounce of curiosity.
Moreover, it cheers one to see wreaths put on at Christmastime, hearts for Valentine’s Day, shamrocks on St. Patrick’s Day and eggs for Easter. Often cars come through the narrow lanes, and someone stops by a grave to lay upon it a bouquet of flowers. Seeing this, how could one not believe Sappho, that “someone will remember us / I say / even in another time”?
My favorite cemetery in the whole world is the Cimitero Acattolico in Rome, where I spent many happy hours on a warm summer day ambling through the graves. Fittingly, it lies in the shadow of the Pyramid of Cestius, built in the late 1st century BC as a tomb for a Roman magistrate: “one keen pyramid with wedge sublime… doth stand / Like flame transform’d to marble; and beneath, / A field is spread, on which a newer band / Have pitched in Heaven’s smile their camp of death,” writes Percy Bysshe Shelley in “Adonais,” eulogizing John Keats, who was buried there. Little more than a year after writing that poem, Shelley too would be buried there. It gave me a chill to see the famous inscription on Keats’s tombstone, “Here lies One whose Name was writ in Water,” with my own eyes, and another chill to see Shelley’s humbler Cor Cordium, hovering above lines of Ariel’s song from Shakespeare’s Tempest.
And yet, wonderful though it was to see the graves of two of my favorite poets, I was moved all the more by the hundreds of lesser-knowns, the details of whose lives, not meticulously sketched out in biographies, were left for me to wonder upon. As long as she is read, a poet lives, but everyone else must be consciously resuscitated. Addressing his three children, one man left the inscription, “…with love from your father who never stopped loving you. ‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever.’” Did something happen to divide this man from his children so that he felt compelled to leave behind this reassurance? And did he know he would be buried in the same cemetery as Keats, so that he quoted the first line of Endymion, making the cemetery itself an intertextual experience? Another epitaph that moved me to tears was a paragraph written by her widowed mother for 16-year-old Rosa Bathurst, which ends with a sentence to rival anything Keats or Shelley ever penned, “Early, bright, transient, chaste as morning dew, she sparkled, was exhaled, and went to heaven.”4
Such pathos did not seem at odds with the beauty of the place, hazed with Italian sunlight, brimming over with irises and yellow and pink chrysanthemums so bright they were almost neon and delicate white florets of baby’s breath and lavender-colored rhododendron, ornamented with statues like the Angel of Grief, so beautifully sculpted it could have been in a museum. Neither was humor absent: a cat with the most devil-may-care attitude you’ve ever seen stole my seat on a bench, while a feline friend used some poor person’s skeleton-house as a litter box.
Nature, death, and art—all found their confluence here, merging and flowing into one another like strands of a braid. That life and death feed on one another, nourish, support, maintain, take sustenance from each other, is something to be marveled at. Try as we might, we cannot separate them, for all things have their course, and all things have their end.
John Milton, Paradise Lost
Invisible Cities
now 174
You can read more about Rosa and see the full epitaph here: https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/all-was-mortal
Love this! Great to know I’m not the only one who enjoys regular cemetery walks XD
Ramya, as always very nice exposition of some deep thoughts! It is true, That life and death feed on one another, nourish, support, maintain, take sustenance from each other. However I do feel, one doesn’t have to walk through a cemetery every day to celebrate death in my humble opinion.