Encounters In A Graveyard

Before we begin…love to everyone holding the pain of the world this week. This newsletter talks about death in a way that is abstract and focused on the peace and gifts that a space dedicated to death can bring, but if that doesn’t feel useful today, please feel free to pass it by.

Two months ago, I moved to Brooklyn to live near Green-Wood Cemetery. Since we’re deep into spooky season, I figured it’s a good time to talk about why, so today’s newsletter is Creative Encounters: In A Graveyard!

Some things I’ve come to love about this space from encountering it daily:

It’s freakin gorgeous. It’s a wild, winding, tree-filled adventure with side paths, lakes that sneak up on you, golden light that filters through leaves and over hills. And views of the Statue of Liberty, somehow. There are small headstones worn away by time and barely visible through the grass. There are absurd and ostentatious pyramids and mausoleums. Different historical styles from different centuries. Wild fonts. All of the difference and opulence of New York.

The juxtaposition of memorials that are “supposed” to stand outside of time coexisting with nature, which will slowly and inevitably wear down even things made of stone. My favorite spots in the cemetery are the ones where this is most obvious, where a tree has been planted right in the middle of a plot or next to a headstone, even though its roots will very clearly dislodge and crumble the stone as time marches on. My favorite headstones are the ones that have crumbled and faded. Not trying to control nature’s effects feels in line with a good ethos towards the spirit of death. Build things beautifully and cheerfully, and know that nature will eventually take them away.

The individual spirit of a gravestone. It’s a keeper of personal history, a marker of what was important to someone in their life, their most important relationships (and a marker of all the elisions of history, of women’s often-inferior places on their husbands’ gravestones, of the classed and racialized politics of who can afford to be remembered). It feels participatory; each monument wants to be noticed, wants to tell you about itself.

The confusing and looping sense of time and place. People born in Scotland in the 1700s share space with people from Russia who passed in 2019. None of it is organized; different centuries sit next to each other, maybe even on the same stone. Mashed together, out of order, vastly different lives touching.

A pervasive sense of peace. The people at rest here once had full, rich, horrifying, beautiful, tragic lives. A sizable slice of the vastness of human experience is contained in these 500 acres. And now, for them, all of that stress and striving is over. Now it’s calm. Now they’re lying in the shelter of a massive oak tree.

When I walk through their paths after a long day with my head full of my own fears, the melodrama of my little life, it feels good to be in a place that can hold all of that. We don’t have many spaces where grief is welcomed, where hard feelings are held, where we can coexist with the people who are no longer with us, even the ones we never knew.

Wishing you a peaceful and spooky Friday the 13th!