“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived” (Thoreau 65).
I went to the Homewood Cemetery on a sunny Saturday morning. I half expected the weather to be dark and gloomy, simply because of the connotations of where I was going to be. Instead, after I walked through the ornate stone gates of the historic cemetery I saw a beautiful landscape that was punctuated by glowing sunlight, which, illuminated the snow and created an oddly picturesque setting. I suppose I am uneasy about cemeteries because, in my opinion, they “put the dead on display” –meaning the deceased are memorialized in ways that are unnecessarily extravagant and tend to make more modest graves (and by association those interned within them) look inferior. However, I do not oppose memorializing in the form of written tributes and modest grave decoration, because I believe those miniscule things speak emotional volumes about the life the deceased person lived, how much he/she was loved, and how his/her absence has affected others. Reading the inscriptions on tombstones and getting a sense of who the deceased person was indeed was an extremely cathartic experience, which I will return to later.
As I mentioned, my view of cemeteries was slightly slanted and I believe it can be more attributed to graveyards, which are portrayed as being spookier than the former. Besides the beautiful setting, another “unconventional” sight I witnessed upon entering the cemetery was pair of female joggers gallivanting amongst the graves with their golden retriever in tow. Furthermore, as I walked along one of the initial steep hillsides overlooking a plot of graves I saw a peculiar line of tracks in the snow the descended down the hill. I soon realized that the tracks were from a child’s sled. The next thought that came to my mind was “Why would parents bring their kids to sled in a cemetery?” I guess the obvious answer would be “Yeah, it’s kind of odd, but these are the best hills in the neighborhood, and the dead probably don’t mind too much.” While I don’t think cemeteries should be completely separated from the world of the living, perhaps certain acts should be discouraged from occurring there in order to show respect for the dead. I did feel an imposed censorship fall over me as I ventured throughout the cemetery. Neither did I verbally or internally curse or complain against the biting cold that made my walk pretty uncomfortable, nor did I take the Christian lord’s name in vain when exclaiming my astonishment at the number of graves that covered the cemetery’s many hills. My self-censorship was a bit ridiculous, because in the cemetery there were Chinese Buddhists and Russian Jews, as well.
As I walked along the paths of the Christian section of the cemetery I passed by personal mausoleums that were made out of large blocks of stone, showcased large doorways, and even had decorative columns, which resemble those of the Parthenon. Upon a later Google search, I found that a family related to U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant owned one of the most incredibly looking mausoleums. To my surprise, as I gazed into the crypt I found that there were still three available spaces for family members. If I were to give an award to the most ridiculous family mausoleum, it would have to be to John Worthington, who apparently was a Welsh geologist who worked for Standard Oil. Perhaps one of the inspirations for Daniel Day Lewis’s character “Daniel Plainview” in the movie “There Will Be Blood,” Worthington’s mausoleum was easily the biggest one in the entire cemetery, and not only was its iron gate painted in gold-leaf, but inside were beautiful stained glass fixtures that depicted the origin of Worthington told of, in a brilliant old-English script, his rise to prominence. Even though Worthington was interred alongside his wife and, presumably, his children, only his name is chiseled in big stone letters on the front of the mausoleum.
There were simply too many things to write about during my two-hour walk in the cemetery, from the grand, proud mausoleums to the modest Chinese graves that often had beautifully sounding wind chimes. It was a lot on which to reflect. For a brief moment, I was overcome with laughter as I thought about my great aunt, who died in 1999. Perhaps my family has never really believed in visiting graves, because my great aunt Anna, who was the most recent family member to die, is still in our kitchen. Well, her cremated remains are still in our kitchen, sitting right next to Hunter, our first dog. I don’t know why Anna was never buried, or why her ashes at least weren’t spread throughout Coney Island, where she originally was from. Maybe it was so she could always be with family, so she would never be left alone. People spread their relatives’ ashes in Disneyland attractions for the very same reason. The contrast between Anna sitting in our kitchen and John Worthington, who, in retrospect, has probably done very little for humanity, sitting in his blasphemous monolith was something that was just too funny.
Before the cold of the dead drew me out of the cemetery, I came upon one last grave. It was a three-person plot, of a daughter and her parents. The parents are still alive; their daughter, however, died in 1996 when she was in her mid-twenties. She is flanked by her mourning parents, who wrote a lengthy epitaph and erected a stone bench in front of her final resting place. On the father’s gravestone is etched the aforementioned quote from Thoreau’s Walden. There is no doubt that Thoreau’s thoughts still hit home for many who wish to reflect on their own lives, and measure how they truly lived. As the old cliché goes, death is an unavoidable part of life. Despite people’s respective religious beliefs and social classes, everyone who has or had relatives buried at the Homewood Cemetery are united in mourning. The daughter’s birthday would have been last Thursday, the twentieth, the mother’s was Saturday, the twenty-third, and the father’s is Monday, January the twenty-fourth. Perhaps the father, on the eve on his birthday, is closer to determining whether or not he has, as Thoreau pointed out, “truly lived.” Personally, I hope he finds he has lived and learned some essential facts of life; but I also hope he will find life after death, and be reunited with his daughter again…
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