We’re entering the season of cemeteries, autumn when the leaves turn brown and fall from the trees like so many souls giving up the ghost.
With Halloween, we’ll see a lot of comic graves on napkins, balloons and other party frills as well as in the spooky holiday decorations on homes. For more than 1,000 years, Halloween has been part of a three-day set of Christian holy days along with All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day. (Hallow is an archaic word for Saint.)
While All Saints’ Day was a time to honor those who had lived righteous lives, All Souls’ Day was a time to remember all who had died, particularly relatives and friends. As such it was a day when many families would go to cemeteries to visit the graves of loved ones.
Veterans Day (November 11) has also been a popular time to bring flowers and say prayers at the burial places of men and women who had served in the military.
Cemetery picnics
A century ago, people felt fairly comfortable in graveyards, comfortable enough to bring a blanket and a food basket to have a bit of a picnic. Now, though, on most days, you won’t see many people in a cemetery.
I know. While cemeteries tend to creep out a lot of people, I’m the oddball who enjoys walking amid graves, mausoleums and tombs for the fun of it.
For me, one of the high points of a visit to Paris is a trip to Pere Lachaise Cemetery, a 211-year-old burial ground with some spectacular tombs. There are statues of mourning nymphs and brooding giants, and elegant bas reliefs of beautiful women, and images of grief in a panoply of artistic styles and sizes.
Interesting gravesite monuments can also be found throughout the Chicago region. At Graceland Cemetery, for instance, the burial place of the founder of the National League features a memorial in the shape of a huge baseball. At Rosehill Cemetery, you can find a life-size self-portrait in stone by 19th century sculptor Leonard Volk, showing him sitting very comfortably in a large chair with his floppy hat at his feet.
Face-to-face
But, for me, visiting a cemetery isn’t just about searching out these distinctive, engaging and, at times, mysterious memorials.
When I’m in a cemetery, I really come face-to-face with the reality of my own death.
I know what you’re saying: “Duh!” Well, OK. But what I’m getting at isn’t just the intellectual recognition that death is on the horizon for all of us.
When I’m in a cemetery, I can’t get away with the usual evasions that serve me in everyday life. Death is there. I’m there. In a way, we share my walk through the graves.
This doesn’t make it any easier to accept the fact of death in my life and in everyone’s life. But, perhaps, by cozying up to death in these walks, I’m taking some of the terror away from the end.
Isolation and connection
Still, even more significant is how a visit to a cemetery links me to the billions of people who, throughout human history, have come before and passed on.
Each gravesite monument, whatever its form, has a name or at least stands for someone who had a name. And there they are, one right after the other. I see a memorial for someone named Mejia, near one for someone named Doyle, near one for someone named Kim.
Usually, there are the birth and death dates. These people lived. They breathed. They were joyful and angry, affectionate and in pain, filled with wonder and filled with dread. Like me.
There is much in life that isolates each of us. I’m not talking about the new handheld devices although they do their part. I’m talking about how most of us ride around alone in our cars. How many of us live alone in our homes.
I’m talking about getting onto an “L” train and sitting down in a car with 30 people and not trying to connect to all of them. I couldn’t and wouldn’t want to. In modern life, we are all so crowded together that we need our emotional space as well as our physical space.
The challenge of modern life is to find ways, to discover moments, when it is possible to make an emotional connection with someone else, whether a loved one or a friend or a passing acquaintance. Or a field of dead people?
I’m sure I look isolated when I’m walking through a cemetery. Yet, in an odd way, I’m not. I’ve got Mr. Mejia and Mrs. Doyle and Mr. Kim along with me, as well as the thousands of other men, women and children whose bones are moldering under the bright green grass on a sunny afternoon beneath the bluest of skies, as my heart beats thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump….
Patrick T. Reardon
9.21.2015
Written by : Patrick T. Reardon
For more than three decades Patrick T. Reardon was an urban affairs writer, a feature writer, a columnist, and an editor for the Chicago Tribune. In 2000 he was one of a team of 50 staff members who won a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting. Now a freelance writer and poet, he has contributed chapters to several books and is the author of Faith Stripped to Its Essence. His website is https://patricktreardon.com/.
You are not alone in feeling the past connect to the future when walking through a cemetery. We are who we are because of all who have come before us. We are this link to the future whether we are aware of it or not. Without the past we find in the cemetery, there would be no future. So, I view a walk in the cemetery, as not only honoring our past but also a place to celebrate our future, both literally and figuratively. Thanks for the thoughtful article.
Elaine — You are certainly right. Still, in today’s society, the cemetery has become a forgotten place for most Americans. They’re missing a lot. Pat
I also have fond memories of visiting the cemetery where most of my family is buried. We went several times a year to maintain the graves and always to stop and pray for those who had gone before us and more often to ask for their intercession on our behalf since we firmly believed that they were in the communion of saints. So now I go and sometimes have a grandchild with me as we visit Mom and Dad, Pat, Nick, the Aunts and grandparents. And John tries to make a point of visiting his mother’s grave when we go to Chicago.
My parents never visited the gravesites of their parents. But many of us swing by to see their gravesite on the Far Southwest Side. If I’m in the neighborhood, I often think to stop in and usually do.
I wrote a flat out lovely commentary just now and it was inhaled and hawkered out by the soulless timekeeper of this website. So the world will just have to do without it, except for me who will vibrate for days at the scintillating brilliance conveyed yet cut down so early, too soon entirely…
Alas.