Mom's Rest Stops

After our harrowing adventure in the North Burial Ground with it’s strange inhabitants and car troubles, I was still a little hesitant to enter another cemetery. Thanks to Mom, that fear quickly died as she had discovered another cemetery in Providence: Swan Point Cemetery. We enter through gates and we immediately check the hours of this place to ensure that we aren’t trapped again.

Inside, we find a beautiful and peaceful cemetery, filled with historical tombstones, until my mom decides to take a sharp turn down a hill and we nearly land in the river that runs adjacent to the cemetery. We we enjoyed the rest of the time spent in the cemetery, but now I’ll be sure to avoid cemetery that run to closely to rivers.

    In college, I came to study art and my mom would on occasion come visit me and the local cemeteries. In this particular scenario, she had discover an old graveyard only two miles from campus and wanted to explore it. Agreeing to accompany on her trip, I fully anticipated that all we would see would be some ancient tombstones and some mausoleums. 

We were silent as we drove around the premises until my mother spoke:

“Amber, did you see that man behind the tombstone staring at you?”

I instantly turn around to see rows and rows of tombstones, but no face staring at me. We both continue to experience an eerie feeling from the place.

It was until my mom returned home to tell me that her car broke down in Mystic, Connecticut and needed to be towed 200 miles back home in New Jersey.

We never went back to that cemetery since, nor will we ever.

   A few years ago, my mom wanted to conduct some genealogical research at Holy Cross Cemetery in North Arlington, New Jersey. She also had a friend in the area who she wanted to visit. After a long and leisurely lunch, we set off to the cemetery late in the afternoon at 3:00PM. 

Inside the gates, We have no sense of time as we walk amongst the tombstones. It’s only when we have completed our research and returned to the gates, we find that they are locked! 

Our clock read 5:10pm and we instantly realized that we were trapped! Thankfully, we were accompanied by two other cars who appeared to be in a similar predicament. While the gate keeper came ten minutes later to unlock the gate to release, we’ll be sure to return with a watch.

  Did you know that cemeteries are considered America’s earliest parks? After reading Rebecca Greenfield’s article, “Our First Public Parks: The Forgotten History of Cemeteries” it was intriguing to conceive of the idea of viewing cemeteries for the living, rather than simply for the departed. The idea that cemeteries could be sanctuaries of peace or meditative places for the living have continued for generations.

 To an extent, this is true today, at least with my mom. When I was completing my research for my travel book, it had inadvertently discovered that my mom would take me in my stroller to cemeteries.

Here’s me in my stroller at Holy Cross Cemetery

This inspired the introduction for my book, in which my mom and other countless taphophiles, continually view cemeteries not as places of morbidity or  death, but to renew their spirits.

Sources:

   In continuation of this series of spooky and humorous cemeteries stories, this narrative in particular piqued my interest in capturing these wild tales. I remember the time when my Mom first told this to me years ago, and I still get chills from it. Back in 1985, my mom and my grandparents travelled to Poland to visit family. Meanwhile, my Grandma decides that she was to locate the grave of a long lost relative. Later that day in a taxi with an exhausted cab driver and 12 cemeteries later, my grandparents and my mom had yet to locate the elusive grave. With weakened hopes, they attempt another cemetery, where a woman on a bicycle appears from nowhere. She stops in front of a tombstone and points, before disappearing. To our bewilderment, it’s the tombstone that they had been searching for. 

The lesson of this story: Some ghosts haunt and other help you find a tombstone.

This is my grandma giving directions to the frustrated taxi driver.

Check out this blog about this individual’s interest and love for cemeteries and coins himself a “Tombstone Tourist”

Check out this team of gardeners who plant gardens in cemeteries!

https://www.gravegardeners.org

      While people have been burying the dead for centuries, writer Rebecca Greenfield claims that America obtain it’s first cemetery in 1831. She claims that before this time, cemeteries as we know them today were not the same back then. Cemeteries today act more as isolated, secluded parks established with the sole purpose of holding the dead six feet under it’s surface. Before then, cemeteries were more of a private venues on land usually owned by a church or  the town municipality. 

     This logic is revenant to even here in Providence, RI. When researching the North Burial Ground, Andrew Kull in his book “New England Cemeteries: A Collector’s Guide” explains how this cemetery is the oldest cemetery in Providence. First opened in 1700, it was initially held as “a training field, burying ground, and other public uses.” (Full 198)

    As it appears, our concept of a cemetery’s sole purpose of a place to remember the dead is fairly a modern concept. With my investigation of cemeteries and retelling of these family narratives, I hope to cast cemeteries in a new light of not being a place for sadness, but also a place to celebrate life. 

Sources

Greenfield, Rebecca. “Our First Public Parks: The Forgotten History of Cemeteries”

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/03/our-first-public-parks-the-forgotten-history-of-cemeteries/71818/