The Cemetery Traveler

Tuesday, December 3, 2024

Cemeteries Are Not So Depressing

What is depressing is watching a Thanksgiving Day parade in the rain. Like the one that happened in Philadelphia this year, 2024, and in NYC, to the multi-million-dollar Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade – Jimmy Fallon’s big smile notwithstanding. I wasn’t even there, I was just watching on television. Depressing watching those people trying to have a good time. I’ve had more fun attending funerals in the rain.

It's easy for me, a cemetery creeper, to say that, if you’re depressed, go visit a cemetery! Sometimes the world is too much world us, as Wordsworth wrote. Whether it’s during a busy day at work or I’m sitting in my car in the supermarket parking lot watching rats running under a dumpster, I sometimes long to get away – to a cemetery. Quiet and ratless solitude.

I’ve long felt that there is beauty in the forgotten world of these memory gardens. The absence of distraction allows me to focus, sometimes on nothing in particular. I have fleeting memories of live people whom I’ve met over the years, but I can remember exactly where I made a particular cemetery photograph twenty years ago. I also know that most of my cemetery visits have been fun, and all have been therapeutic. They can be a cushion against the outside world. And those cemetery fences...?

Originally meant to keep the thoughts of the dead away from those of the living, one can also interpret cemetery fences as demarcations, boundaries of a memory world in which hope and solace reside. Cemeteries can sometimes be more than a cushion for us to relax on, they can be a trampoline for our emotions, our creativity – maybe even our sanity. A private place that most people avoid - in our midst but a world away.

Victoria Wyeth, in her Halloween, 2024, lecture on her family’s artwork (virtual gallery talk sponsored by the Brandywine River Museum in Chaddsford, PA), said that after her grandfather Andrew Wyeth died, she was depressed for months. It was only after her Uncle Jamie flew her to Maine to picnic at her grandfather’s grave, did she experience the calm joy of being in a cemetery.

Victoria and her Uncle Andy (who died in 2009) had been very close, she being his only grandchild. A few months after his death, Jamie Wyeth flew her to Maine where he and Victoria’s Dad took her to the cemetery where Andy was buried. They had a picnic. She said they “turned the cemetery into something that’s not scary.” Now, whenever she’s sad or something cool happens, she visits the cemetery and talks with her grandfather. She loves that her Dad and Uncle took a situation like that, brought her to a cemetery and made it normal. She went on to say that this interaction with cemeteries is really important, something people tend to avoid.

I used to think that visiting and volunteering to do work in cemeteries was all about respect – respect for the past, and ultimately, respect for ourselves. I now think that respect ties in deeply with memory. Cemeteries are full of memories - maybe not ours, but we can still appreciate them. I volunteer at Mount Moriah Cemetery in Philadelphia. I’ve witnessed people visiting from a thousand miles away, scooting in a motorized wheelchair up a sidewalk cleared by the Friends of Mount Moriah Cemetery, Inc., to visit a grandparent who had died forty years earlier. Witnessing other people’s experience with memory can create a profound impression, a not depressing memory.

When I wrote my new book, Abandoned Cemeteries of Philadelphia and its Environs (due out in 2025 on Fonthill Media), I mention a quote by my friend Ross Mitchell, who at the time I interviewed him in 2006, was the Executive Director of Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia. I was speaking with him about ways in which an historic cemetery can stay in business (because that’s what cemeteries are, businesses - when they’re full, and can have no new burials, there is no income).

Laurel Hill, like many cemeteries, hosts events. Sometimes admission is charged, usually donations are requested. Laurel Hill has hosted rock concerts, movie nights, historic tours, running events, classic hearse shows - all to engage the community and create positive memories for the attendees. Such events raise money for the upkeep of the grounds. I asked Ross how he came to terms with people thinking that fund-raising events in a cemetery was disrespectful, an impingement on peoples’ memories. He said:

“People really need to come here and see Laurel Hill for themselves. They need to overcome their inhibition of ‘why would I want to visit a cemetery’ and realize that not all cemeteries are very depressing places. In fact I think this one is really a celebration of life. And you talk about, well, isn’t it disrespectful? If you look at the monuments and the sculpture in Laurel Hill you know these people wanted these monuments to be seen.”

There are many reasons to visit a cemetery, you don’t need to be visiting someone who died. There is history, art, architecture - and everything in a cemetery changes with the seasons of the year; things look different whenever you visit. You will witness the embodiment of other peoples’ memories and will come away with your own. While its true that during a brief visit we only get a fleeting glimpse of other peoples’ lives, but this can be enough.

My friend George Hofmann, in his article, Bipolar Disorder and Memory writes about his memory as he gets older (George actually works in a cemetery) - “Instead of some deep resonance I’m lost in wavering impressions. Impressions can be beautiful. Beauty comes more readily in a forgotten world.”

In the same article, Hofmann mentions a line from the movie, Nomadland, in which the central character states, “What’s remembered lives.” I have all good memories of cemeteries, even the one where I attended the burial of a friend’s nine-year-old son. Although that day was traumatic, the memory was modified years later, when the Dad took over the care of this cemetery - the prior owner could no longer manage it. So this Thanksgiving season, there are things to be thankful for, like memories. And come to think of it, I’ll bet all those people standing in the rain at this year’s Thanksgiving Day parades came away with good memories.

The last question Victoria Wyeth asked her grandfather before he died, was about how to create the color black. He said that he didn’t start by squeezing inky paint from a tube. “You build in the excitement before adding black, you slowly build it up with blues and reds and greens.” So let’s all make sure that when our screens go black, our lives will remain a colorful memory for those we leave behind - full of blues and reds and greens. When they visit your grave, let them leave with a smile - even if they don't know who you are.