Three blocks from my house is a very quiet village of over 50,000 inhabitants. I say “quiet” because the village is a large Catholic cemetery established in 1940.
A few times a week, I walk a two-mile route through the cemetery with our dog. In any direction, one can see new, polished headstones, vintage angel statues, and imposing monuments that seem to stare each other down. One also sees many aging headstones, some of which appear to be suffering the effects of long-term illness. The constant chorus of birdsong by finches, robins, cardinals, and warblers, in unexpected harmonies, is a welcome counterweight to the grass-covered gravestones that mutely consent to the creeping oblivion of invisibility.
To walk in a cemetery is to walk through time, and to acknowledge that, for everyone whose name is shown, earthly time has come to an end. I need to walk only a few feet to cross a span of a hundred years. Unlike every other place I go to engage with modern living, I have come to appreciate that there is no waiting, no hurrying, and no interruptions in a cemetery. The dead are always here and gratefully accept visits, however long or short.
Walking along, there my son-in-law’s grandparents lie in rest, side by side. Sighting the headstone from a distance, I step back into their welcoming smiles and warm greetings and relive their ability to make everyone feel they matter.
Annually I attend a retreat with seventy other men. Here is the grave of a fellow retreatant’s fifty-one-year-old son, who died from heart disease. With every walk-by, the memory of the father’s face, simultaneously expressing acceptance and incomprehension over his son’s untimely death, resurfaces. I see this man once a year; I visit his son every week.
I pass the burial site of a buddy whose friendship lasted over fifty years. Such a rush of memories; sounds and images of his laugh, his strongly spoken opinions, his love of baseball and movies coalesces in a mental collage of mirth and mourning. His burial spot, still awaiting the headstone, spurs the memory of his comment to the high school basketball coach upon noticing a clock had finally been installed in the locker room: “It’s about time!”
The many statues of Jesus and Mary here remind me I walk among those who share a belief in them. This is no small benefit. To whatever degree those lying here believed and followed the example of Jesus and whatever degree of importance Mary had for them, the fact that they are represented here means they were important during their lives as well as now, in their rest. Where else can I walk and experience the sense that eternity is close by? And in what other space can I walk with the conviction that, despite time having stopped for those buried here, it has not ended for them?
The cemetery’s eastern side gently slopes downward from the main road, creating the effect of a valley in the middle expanse. Standing at the top of the slope, looking over the valley, the crucifixes emerge as the predominant figures in the cemetery. The variety in size, design, and texture acts as a kind of reflection in my mind of how people proclaim their faith; some as the sons of thunder, others earnestly soft-spoken, others with hopeful affirmation. Whatever the voice, I feel part of a faith community here.
The cemetery has its own rural area. On the southern end of the grounds, pear-shaped trees sit in solitary repose on open expanses of soft, emerald grass encircling a still pond. An uphill, S-shaped road on the northern side disappears around a corner. The walk here often suggests the opening line from Christina Rossetti’s poem Up-Hill:
“Does the road wind up-hill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.”
I walk past the large markers for the seven archbishops buried here and think of the up hill work they all had to do. They all made mistakes, and they all accomplished good for others.
I recall Dickens’ Ghost of Christmas Past telling Scrooge that the mournful ghosts were tormented by the awareness that they had lost forever the ability “to interfere for good in human matters”.
As I leave the cemetery and get back on the main road, I feel grateful that, despite my own mistakes, I may still be granted time to interfere for good in human matters.