Visiting the Dead

Having a GPS receiver has revolutionized my ability to find and visit old cemeteries.  Using Find-A-Grave.com and google maps, I can often determine the latitude and longitude of any given cemetery.  This is especially important because cemeteries are usually located in out of the way places.  They do not usually occupy prime commercial frontage, although a few of them do.  Small ones are often tucked back of behind subdivisions or on side streets. The explanation for this is not hard to find, since they are often the oldest thing in any given locality.   Cemeteries that were out in the countryside when founded a hundred or a hundred and fifty years ago are often now located in the suburbs or in industrial parks.  There right next to a subdivision, or an industrial warehouse, is a cemetery.  In sight of a McDonalds you have the ancestral dead first planted by the suburban pioneers or billboards hawking the most ephemeral wishes of the living: such as winning the lottery.  

Money, like many things, is of no use to the dead.  They never go anywhere, never see anything, and never go out to eat.  They have no mortgage, no debts, no expenses and no one they have to please.   We, the living are enslaved by our need to keep the physiological conveyor belt going.  Food goes in here, waste goes out there.  We bide our time, we watch our video screens, or read our papers.   We make love, raise our children, we work, we sleep.  None of this makes much sense to the dead.  What could the dead possibly be doing, if anything?  Do they watch the living, as some of us watch TV?  Do they go on vacations to the Bahamas, travel in time, or play tricks on the living?  Do the dead talk among themselves and compare notes?   Do they have axes the grind against us so that when we do arrive in that undiscovered country, do they give us hell, or pat us on the back?   How do you keep the dead off the streets and out of trouble?  Indeed. 


We commonly say that the dead are "in a better place" or "beyond all cares".   It is unbearable to imagine that they are "in a worse place" and not "beyond all cares."   For our loved ones we wish all the best, that they are happy, in whatever sense happiness has any meaning for the dead. For the ones we don't love, well, should we worry about their unhappiness?  Do we need to buy them off?  Can they strike at us and nag us?  I love my dear departed spouse, but I suspect she would give me no end of grief about what a mess my house has become or how I've let certain things, our old friendships, be neglected.    Jeez, I neglect the living as much as I neglect the dead.   Forgive me, there is just one of me.  I do the best I can.  As a living person I have needs.  I need to eat, sleep, and keep myself from losing my mind. It's not always as easy as it seems.   


Anyway I found a cemetery, whose coordinates I had saved in my GPS and, getting behind the wheel of my car, told it to guide me to Elmwood Cemetery, in Elmwood Park, IL.  This is a suburban cemetery, and I attempted to visit it a week ago but they were having a huge funeral attended by it seemed half the police and many of the firemen in the region.  I learned the name of the person who had died a week later, it was a marine name Nicholas Phillips, who had apparently died in Afghanistan.  The fact that this was also Veterans Day might also have entered into it.   Of course I did not know Mr. Phillips, but I honored him with my presence, watched on the roadside as his funeral procession rolled slowly past.  But I did not explore that cemetery, because there was just too much going on over there.  I visited St. Joseph's cemetery instead,  which was right across the street, and it was interesting.  It was an Italian Catholic Cemetery, and I should have gathered that much from the name.     It was not an old cemetery, but one which had ground level markers and large sculptures of the major players in the bible, Jesus, Mary, and the authors of the four gospels.   There were two mausoleums of which I visited one but not the other.  It was an open air thing.  


And of course various markers.  These often included images of Jesus, Mary, the holy family.  Some show Mary with the baby Jesus, sometimes along with Joseph.  Others show Jesus as an adult, preaching, or hanging from the cross, or dragging the cross up Calvary, or with Mary holding her lifeless son in her lap with a look of despair on her face.  You also often see the last supper, the famous fresco by Michelangelo, reproduced in stone. 

All this is kind of predictable.  After visiting cemetery after cemetery it dawns on you that there is a certain industrial sameness to it all.  We all owe God a death.  Apparently we also owe the world a bit of stone, embalming fluid, and maybe a statuette, according to our means.  Real estate being as expensive as it is, many of the dead are going into high rise memorials with a brass plate on a marble wall.  And in monument companies all over America and indeed much of the world, there are tearful widows or widowers being gently guided through catalogs showing various models or looking through showrooms.  I did, and if I had known then what I know now, I would have gotten a better marker for my wife's grave, but it was her death that made me a cemetery tourist, and I've learned a lot about it since then.