Continental Cemetery Disparity
Have you ever started home after a particularly mentally draining day at work and just totally zoned out while you were driving? I sometimes turn my brain so completely OFF on my ride home that I’ll occasionally look up and realize, “damn, I’m already to 82nd… how’d I get here so fast?” I hear people say things like, “I’ve done such and such so many times that I could do it with my eyes closed.” I feel that way about driving home from work. So I was really surprised just yesterday to find that there is a cemetery on Lombard, right in the middle of industrial North Portland. I’ve probably passed it a hundred times and I literally had no idea it was there. If someone said, “I got in to an accident on Lombard, right in front of the cemetery” I’d assume they meant a totally different part of town.
I started thinking then about cemeteries and how weird it is to have a bunch of little parks full of buried dead bodies right along busy boulevards throughout the city. There’s another one over by 97th and Sandy which is a major thoroughfare as I-205 both accepts and dumps north and southbound traffic there. A few blocks away there’s another one, situated between a Les Schwab and a K-mart. They make me sad, these little old graveyards. They’re nice enough looking places, not formidable or creepy like the ones in horror movies. They’d almost pass for an agreeable place to snack on a sandwich lunch in the summer time but I feel like for some reason that is trespassing. Is it? If I don’t have a family bond with any of the tenants can I still go and sit and enjoy the grass and stonework? Nobody else seems to do this so I feel almost obliged to. I mean, they pay somebody to cut the grass and haul off the leaves and right the headstones that pranksters knock over. It’s probably my tax dollars that pay the guy’s wages so why shouldn’t I take a stroll through? Or maybe it’s not trespassing that I’m afraid of. The American idea of death is sadness and loss or blood and guts rot and decay. Would sitting in the cemetery awaken fears of zombies and ghouls rising from the grave or fears of my own mortality?
In Mexico, the day after Halloween is widely celebrated by picnicking at the graves of loved ones. Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) is not morbid or occult but a festive celebration of (what Elton John would call) the circle of life. I like that. The recognition that death (no matter what you believe happens after it) is a part of life. And in that tradition, I’d like to wish you all a very happy All Saints Day. Will anyone join me at the cemetery?
3 comments:
I'm just grateful that we still allow our dead to rest in peace in those cemetaries we drive by daily (noticed or not). I mean, really, in such a space restrictive society, I'm surprised we don't have burial plots closely resembling parking garages. Or worse, a law that requires each of us to get roasted in a crematorium and sifted into a canteen upon our demise. Of course my first choice would be to be propped up beside the jukebox when I die.
I have heard of the "multiple-stack" theory of digging 18, 12, 6 feet down and each level having a body buried, to conserve space. Which would make for an odd formation of headstones, I think.
I wish it were more acceptible to wander through graveyards. I know people who've lived near them who have taken a little day-trip through to examine the headstones and ruminate on the lives of the people enterred there. But I think they ought to have areas where you can sit and picnic, and have the common rule be "don't stand on the graves" out of respect for the dead. But then, what happens when the chiddlers get rummy and start playing tag across the grass? Is that okay? Personally, I think any ancestors looking down would probably smile, just like the rest of us, to see the next generation gamboling around and giggling like crazy.
Back when I thought "higher education" meant it would teach me something I couldn't learn on my, I was taking a midnight shorcut through a local cemetary. (Respectfully, I stayed on the footpaths)
As it happens, I stepped on the leg of a person sleeping there and he scared the stuffing out of me.
The moral is, we really don't expect people to sit up and yell in a cemetary in the middle of the night. Period.
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