This time of year, my neighborhood turns into a cemetery of sorts (and I assume that this is true for most readers as well). Gravestones sprout from manicured lawns, sporting an array of absurd names: Pearl E. Gates; Barry M. Goode; Daisy Pusher; Myra Mains; Helen Back. More than a few with the inscription R.I.P. also have arm bones emerging from the ground; apparently there is very little R or P. My youngest and I love wandering the neighborhood and checking out these decorations. When he is not with me, I hardly notice them, but when we walk together, we need to stop and read every headstone. He is not quite 8 and still clearly derives a mix of both ghoulish pleasure and true apprehension from the skeletons and zombies and gravestones.
In October it feels a bit like one of my niche interests goes mainstream, for I spend more time in cemeteries than most people. I have always found them to be fascinating places, partly for the vaguely macabre reasons that the neighbors’ decorations intrigue my son, and partly because of the way they capture history.
My affinity for graveyard walks might have begun on Boston’s Freedom Trail. I have clear memories of being a middle schooler and entering the Granary Burying Ground and seeing gravestones for figures out of my history books — Paul Revere, Sam Adams, John Hancock — in a very old fashioned churchyard in the midst of a bustling city. As someone who had grown up in western Pennsylvania, the juxtaposition of this kind of history steps from a Dunkin’ Donuts felt bizarre and wondrous.
It is not that I was never exposed to interesting burial places back in Erie. On special occasions my grade school choir would troop across the street to St. Peter’s Cathedral and head down to the rehearsal space in the church basement. This choir room was adjacent to the crypt where the past bishops of the Erie Diocese were interred. We knew they couldn’t actually hear us singing, but rehearsals down there were always a bit more reverent than when we were practicing in the choir room over at the school. That, to me, was (and is) the essence of Catholicism — the mix of joyous hymns and the presence of corpses a few steps away. Death and life, celebration and mourning.
Over the years I have visited any number of cemeteries; there are cities like Rome and New Orleans where they are just part of the standard tourist experience. When I lived in Boston as an adult, I once again walked the Freedom Trail and stopped in the various historical burying grounds and made a pilgrimage out to Mount Auburn Cemetery, which is famed for helping start the American public parks movement. It was one of the most visited tourist destinations in the country in the mid-1800s, and it is still a truly beautiful, peaceful place to stroll.
But all of that is pretty standard fare. I didn’t really start becoming a frequent cemetery visitor until about a decade ago, when we moved to the far west side of Ann Arbor, Michigan. Our neighborhood was bordered on one side by lakes and trails and on the other by Bethlehem Cemetery, which, as the historical marker on the grounds proudly declares, is “one of the oldest and largest cemeteries in Washtenaw County.” The first burial was in 1834, and it still is an active burial ground.
When I first started walking the grounds of Bethlehem Cemetery, I felt a bit like I was trespassing. Not literally — I knew the grounds were open — but these were not my dead; they were not my relatives or even really my neighbors. What right did I have to stroll among their gravestones? But there are only so many good places to stroll on the far west side of the city, and I had to walk past the cemetery to get anywhere worth going (the library, the bookstore, the Middle Eastern sandwich shop).
The church has long had a tradition of the memento mori, the explicit reminder that life is fleeting, and we are destined for something beyond this world.
So, on days when I wanted a particularly peaceful place to amble, without the distractions of cars, bikes or other pedestrians, I started to incorporate a loop of the cemetery grounds into my walks. Sometimes I’d put in my AirPods and keep my head down, power walking the loops, thinking about whatever lesson plan I was working up for my courses, or an essay topic I was researching. But sometimes I would stop and read the headstones and wonder about these people who were once just as alive as I. And then, inevitably, I would offer up a prayer for their peaceful repose and ask, in a general way, for them to pray for me as well.
Over the years I have come to find that walking in the cemetery in late October feels almost cliche. The sound of dry leaves skittering across the gravestones, while a chill wind blows through the bare branches overhead, is the essence of spooky season. But there is something beautiful about visiting year round and witnessing the cycle of death and rebirth within the cemetery gates: in late winter, when most of the gravestones are fully buried, and even the tall, imperious ones are snow covered and impossible to read; in early spring, when new shoots rise around the edges of the property and the few bushes planted throughout the grounds start to bud; and in high summer, when the sound of children playing in my own neighborhood carries over the fence into the stillness of the rows of graves.
The cemetery is divided into blocks, like any neighborhood, and there are notable conclaves of ethnicities and families. In the oldest part of the grounds, the faces of some gravestones are so worn by time and weather that they are completely illegible. Almost all the gravestones, whether from the 1800s or the 2020s, are unadorned. They usually contain just names and dates; sometimes there are familial titles: wife, father, daughter, child. A few are marked with fresh flowers, some with flags, but most are bare. Some of the last names are familiar from various parks or other landmarks around town; presumably these are the founding families of Ann Arbor. A couple of the last names are the same as former coworkers of mine, and I wonder if these are their relatives and, if so, if they know they are buried here.
It is good to spend time among the dead; to pray for them and ask for prayers in return. So this November, the church’s month of remembrance, perhaps you can seek out a quiet graveyard, and say a prayer for the souls of the dead.
And while I initially thought of all of these people as not really “mine,” over the past 10 years they have, in a sense, become so. Or, at least I think it’s reasonable to assume that I spend more time thinking about, and praying for, most of these souls than just about anyone. Of course many of these graves are still regularly visited by loved ones, and all are scrupulously cared for by the cemetery maintenance staff. But some of these headstones go back almost 200 years, and I assume that in many cases the descendants of their descendants don’t even know they have ancestors buried here.
I do not know where my great-grandparents are buried, and with only one exception, have not been back to visit my grandparents’ plots since their various funerals. Their final resting places are hundreds of miles from where I now live, in places I have no other reason to visit. And, of course, we do not need to be at a graveside to pray for the dead. But there is something lovely about walking past these markers and being reminded of unknown lives and the fact that before too long we all will be forgotten. And also, that this is okay. Nothing is more natural.
The church has long had a tradition of the memento mori, the explicit reminder that life is fleeting, and we are destined for something beyond this world. But modernity is set up to more or less erase this reality. The elderly, sick and dying are, more often than not, set apart from the rest of society. The “death care industry” operates in such a way that we rarely encounter death in an unmediated way. With few exceptions, cemeteries are places set on the margins of where we live — and rarely visited.
Even Halloween, which, on some level, should be a holiday that foregrounds our own mortality, is so over the top and commercialized that any actual reckoning with our own temporality is pushed to the margins. But it is good to spend time among the dead; to pray for them and ask for prayers in return. So this November, the church’s month of remembrance, perhaps you can seek out a quiet graveyard, and say a prayer for the souls of the dead:
Eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord,
and let perpetual light shine upon them.
May the souls of all the faithful departed,
through the mercy of God, rest in peace.
Amen.