By Melinda Halpert
My childhood summer vacations invariably included stops at old cemeteries. My parents made sure we visited famous ones like Sleepy Hollow in Concord, MA, where Thoreau, Emerson, Hawthorne, and Louisa May Alcott are buried—which may have had something to do with my becoming an English major. More often, we’d notice a lonesome graveyard by the road, and stop to acknowledge those spending eternity beneath thin, tilting tombstones with barely legible engraving. My father pointed out one headstone with a vivid admonition that has stayed with me:
Memento Mori
As you are now, so I once was.
As I am now, so you will be.
Memento mori. Remember death. Indeed.
In high school, my friend Diane and I often biked to Forest Lawn Cemetery, the pastoral crown jewel of our hometown, Buffalo, NY Surrounded by expansive lawns and gorgeous statuary, we’d spread our books out and do our homework there. We imagined that Wednesday Addams would have approved of the setting, and it was much quieter than study hall. One day a guy who worked in the crematorium stopped to talk. We thought he might be trying to pick us up, but he just seemed happy conversing with actual living beings. He was a fount of curious facts about combustion and the granularity of ash. In recent years, I’ve visited the mausoleum at Forest Lawn where my favorite aunt and uncle are interred— if interred is the right word for those filed away inside the walls. I have to crane my neck to find their shiny, brass nameplates, stacked among so many others.
My parents and most of my mother’s family are buried in Elmlawn Cemetery, not as swanky as Forest Lawn, but closer to where I grew up—and as my father would note, a short drive from the airport for those times he imagined me “coming to see them,” the ultimate euphemism.
During my freshman year in college, I returned home to attend the burial service at Elmlawn of my dear and ditzy great-aunt Hannah. As the Rabbi droned on, I looked around and remembered my father teaching me to drive in that cemetery. The quiet lanes were perfect for practicing three-point turns, and “Besides,” my dad would wink, “if you hit someone, they won’t have far to go.”
I return to Buffalo every five years or so now and take what I call the necrology tour to visit family graves. Each time, in keeping with the Jewish tradition of remembrance, I leave small stones on my parents’ shared headstone. Each time, I cry. Still. Overwhelmed by how many more graves I recognize, I feel like I’m walking through some suburban Jewish rendition of Our Town—there’s the orthodontist I loathed, and there are the parents of a boy I liked in junior high. Back there is my flute teacher. And down the row from my parents is my friend’s mother, Viv, who was never without a cigarette or a cup of strong, black coffee.
Not long ago, I got a call from a real estate agent, referred by mutual friends. He spoke of a new opportunity, in a spectacular location—under a large shade tree, off a lovely walkway. Realizing then that he was also the sales rep for our synagogue’s cemetery, I thanked him and said we would get back to him. We did not.
For someone who inherited an affection for cemeteries, I’ve been in serious denial about the plans my husband and I have put off making. I sketched out a decision tree of our after-death options, but I become paralyzed with the choices surrounding where we want to end up and in what form:
● Burial or cremation?
○ If burial, traditional or the more environmentally friendly eco-burial? I do like the idea of being among trees as my green casket and I disintegrate responsibly.
○ If burial, then where?
■ Washington, DC, that has been our home for more than forty years?
■ The faraway cemetery in Maryland that our synagogue oversees? But since I rarely go to services now, do I want to spend eternity with the congregation?
■ Somewhere near our sons, but who knows where they might be?
■ One thing I do know is that there will be no open casket, no viewings. I still remember my shock at seeing my grandmother laid out in the glitzy, sequined evening gown she had worn to my cousin’s Bar Mitzvah party, and my mother whispering to me: “Well, look who’s all dressed up with nowhere to go.”
○ If we go with cremation, what happens to our “cremains?” (Dreadful word, cremains).
■ Bury them? If so, where? (See above.)
■ And if interred, in what receptacle? This question nags at me. I recall a distant cousin whose ashes were interred in the FedEx box that had carried her from Arizona to Connecticut via a stop in Memphis. I’d like something a bit better than that, maybe a nice vase from HomeGoods.
■ If we opt for the scattering of ashes, then where?
● A small picturesque lake? But the one I have in mind was stocked with bass recently, and the prospect of becoming part of their food chain does not thrill me.
● A beach? A hilltop? I replay that hilarious scene from The Big Lebowski where Steve Buscemi’s ashes blow back onto Jeff Bridges. I’d hate to do that to my kids, even as a last laugh.
My husband and I don’t want to leave these dreary decisions to our sons. And selfishly, I’d like to avoid ending up, by default, on a shelf in one of their garages, next to old hockey gear and bags of mulch.
To paraphrase a game show popular with our age cohort, we are approaching final jeopardy where anything can happen. So, while I recognize the need to plan, and soon, none of the options are appealing. I do find odd comfort in the astringent words of my late mother-in-law: “Dead is dead.” What possible difference will it make to us?
Still, I like the idea of permanence, even if we are not. A stone, something with our names, some marker somewhere that acknowledges our lives. As we once were. As we will be.