Cemeteries are generally sad places. Dead cemeteries even more so. The sorrow that pervades them seems a commentary on the living, not the dead.
I visited a dead cemetery recently. Even in its glory years, if it had them, it wasn’t much. A half-acre or so. All the gravestones flat on the ground – no monuments, no ivy, no shrubs, no flowers. Small American flags marking the plots of veterans who lay there its only adornment. Only a few small stones left by recent visitors.
The cemetery in question had been established by the congregation of the small Jewish temple where I grew up. The congregation is no more. Their cemetery is dead.
Some people are cemetery people. Some aren’t. I’m not a cemetery person. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I’ve been to this one: my dad’s funeral in 2004, the unveiling of his gravestone a few months later, my mom’s funeral in 2015, and her unveiling. My dad wasn’t a cemetery person either. Although both of his parents were buried in a slightly less dead graveyard a few miles from this one, I don’t recall ever going there with him.
My mom, though – mom was definitely a cemetery person. Several times each year – usually on a Sunday when dad was playing golf – mom and I would cross the state line to the big (or, at least, bigger) city cemetery where her father lay. I never knew my grandpa. He died about five years before I was born. My dad used to say that mom had worshipped him. I got that.
During our visits, we would plant fresh flowers and trim the bushes by his headstone and the ivy that covered the ground above grandpa and his casket. Judging from the number of spigots that sprouted around this cemetery, plenty of mourners did the same. The pipes grew out of the ground just high enough to allow a watering can to sit beneath them.
Then mom would talk to grandpa for a while, say a little prayer, and adjust the greenery a bit more, and we’d head home.
There was another, more pragmatic reason I didn’t visit my parents’ graves more frequently. My family and I live about 1,400 miles away these days. Trips “up home” have typically been short and hectic. I simply didn’t have time for a low priority activity.
This visit, amid the COVID-19 pandemic and mass remote working, was different. We went for three weeks, mostly to spend time with my mother-in-law and others in my wife’s family who still live nearby. (I have one cousin who spends his summers there and moves to his Florida home when the temperature and leaves drop. This was November, so he wasn’t around.) Early one Wednesday (or Thursday?) afternoon, I took advantage of our relaxed schedule, climbed into the van, and drove to the cemetery. I didn’t expect to find anyone else there and wasn’t disappointed.
I pulled around the curved driveway, built for the hearses and parade of cars filled with mourners that no longer come to a dead cemetery. It was neat and tidy. The flat gravestones and absence of any plantings other than grass make mowing simple. Perpetual care for the residents isn’t costing the congregation’s cemetery trust fund much.
I spent some time wandering around the plots. I saw a few of my parents’ friends and a few of my friends’ parents. I recognized the names of many in the congregation I knew as a kid -- older men whose bald heads I would stare at and older women whose perfume I could smell from several pews away. Other names were familiar in a different way. They were the temple’s founding members who passed away before I was alive but whose support for the congregation was commemorated on the beautiful stained-glass windows in the sanctuary. I used to study those windows in boredom. Each depicted the 12 tribes of Israel – the Lion of Judah, the Grapes of Dan. (Or was that Asher? Or Gad?)
I found my parents’ site along the eastern edge of the graveyard. Unremarkable other than the flag denoting dad’s Army service during World War II. The plaque on mom’s gravestone, unveiled in September 2015 about nine months after her death, did seem shinier than the others. As I drifted back toward the van, my eye shifted from the names on the stones to the dates. Very few marked the graves of anyone who had passed away after dad did in December 2004. Only two – one of my parents’ dearest friends and a lady I recognized as a distant relative – had moved in since mom’s funeral five years ago.
That’s when I realized this is a dead cemetery. To paraphrase the awful old pun, no one is dying to get in here anymore.
The contrast between my hometown and my current address is striking. I live now in one of the fastest growing cities in the country. Nearly 900 people move here every week – really more, because that number is net of people who leave. It’s a million-plus metropolis whose crane-studded skyline is under constant transformation.
Where I grew up was never a boomtown, but it once had a solid manufacturing base; it housed its share of the string of smokestacks that followed the Ohio, Beaver, and Shenango rivers north out of Pittsburgh. Today, it’s a Rust Belt poster child. Most of the downtown buildings that haven’t been torn down are condemned or boarded up or replaced by Dollar Trees. Near the city center, a corner that used to house a busy drug store now has an odd micro-park featuring graffitied signs claiming, “Progress is Visible.” (Really? I didn’t see any.)
The population peaked at almost 49,000 in 1950 – six years before I was born. It’s less than half that today – almost all of them gentile.
The town never had a large Jewish community, but enough for our temple and another – larger and more conservative – congregation. They included many shopkeepers and professionals. It was my generation that left; we went off to college and never came home. Many of us moved far away. Few new families moved there. The exodus forced the two congregations first to merge then to close altogether. The only ones left from our temple family are a few of the younger members of my parents’ cohort. I know of only one person my age who came back home.
Even my parents left – for a while. They bought a home in South Florida and spent all of dad’s final years and most of mom’s there. They had purchased their plots long ago, though, so both made one last trip home, resting comfortably in their caskets, en route to the nearly dead cemetery.
The demise of the Jewish community back home isn’t a unique occurrence – or a new one. Small towns in rural America have been shrinking and dying off since the turn of the last century. Mass migrations south and west have meant the same fate for the old industrial centers of the north and east. And as the cities emptied out, so did communities within them – the neighborhoods, congregations, and social clubs. Just as the smallest towns were most at risk, so were the smallest communities. They leave behind only husks, or memories, or cemeteries. The Rust Belt is home to plenty of dead cemeteries.
On one of my last days up home, I drove down a street where many of the city’s once-grand old houses still stand under larger oak canopies. They once were home to the area captains of industry. Some are now occupied by non-profit groups that keep them looking at least presentable. A few, though, are sad relics. Walls and roofs are caving in. The once majestic yards overgrown with weeds. Windows gone or broken.
Those houses are not just dead; they’re abandoned. No one wants them anymore. I suspect they’ll eventually be razed and turned into parking lots that are never used – just like what happened to many of the buildings a few blocks away in the faded downtown.
These barely standing old mansions sit as reminders of what happened to the little city – the plants and mills left, jobs left, shops left, those of us lucky enough to move away left. What’s left is a hollow remnant of what once was, a town no one wants anymore.
Now that, is sad. So much sadder than my dead cemetery.
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