Gavin Guerrette, Photography Editor
I walk into the Grove Street cemetery. The evergreen spruce mocks its deciduous kinsman as leaves, red with the blood of autumn, drop from the branches of the Hawthorn trees, falling delicately to the ground. When the gilded October sunlight filters through the leaves, the hoary headstones and statues of venerable saints and cuneiforms take on a different intensity; the colors sharpen, breathing life back into the dilapidated mementos. I am searching for epigraphs to translate for my Latin class, when I am faced with something I didn’t intend to find for the epigraphy project. In a place that exists because people die, I found immeasurable amounts of life.
I fixated my eyes to the names etched at the head of each tombstone. The stones were at various stages of decay, the names lost to lichens and corrosion.
“William B. Hogeboom… wounded at the 2nd Battle of Bull Run.”
“Our darling Anna… wife of Charles D. Rood.”
“Phyllis Brown Sandine… What a woman.”
I even found the Latin inscription I was looking for. The pious ecclesiastical Latin of the early American headstones did not rival the sorrowful epitaphs that adorn the Roman funerary markers. Still, the early New Haven families still made poetry from death. In reading these inscriptions I create stories for each of these people, piecing together titles and words to imagine their lives.
I haven’t always been fascinated with the concept of death, but I have always found cemeteries and what they stood for, like Grove Street Cemetery in New Haven, rather beautiful. My grandmother loves cemeteries, which is where I learned my appreciation. We took trips around the country throughout my childhood, and she would always find a local cemetery to visit. In a coastal town in Texas, she would read the words etched beneath a picture of a shrimp boat, telling stories of men whose bodies were not spared by the Gulf of Mexico. In Salem, Massachusetts, she looks at the antiquated stones in admiration for those persecuted in the witch trials. In the Grove Hill Cemetery in Dallas, she visits the familiar ghost of her father with my great grandma to pay respects to the long gone carpenter.
As my grandmother has gotten older, she hasn’t lost her interest in the cemeteries – if anything, the intensity with which she enjoys visiting them has grown. On her recent visit over fall break, we went to a cemetery in Old Wethersfield, Connecticut, and we practiced the familiar act of walking slowly around the cemetery, admiring the trees, the flowers and the noteworthy inscriptions that simplify the entirety of an ephemeral lifetime in a couple of sentences.
This trait has been passed down from her to me, and now I participate in this practice on my own. In Europe this summer, I visited the graveyard that was divided by the Berlin wall. In my own small town, I visited a local cemetery which I had passed daily yet never visited. Stillborn infants, century old love stories, fallen veterans and thousands of rusted crosses sprawl through that cemetery. Names I found familiar, considering the same families that founded the town in 1872 had been living and dying there ever since, were lost to lichens and time. And most recently, in coming to Yale I found life after death in the Grove Street Cemetery.
The Grove Street Cemetery has long allowed families to have a place that will honor the bodies of their dead. It is separated just barely from the surrounding traffic, allowing silence to settle over the cemetery. The cemetery entrances passersby with its siren song, intriguing the living to inquire about the possibilities after death. Once you have entered the cemetery, you are enveloped in a serenity framed by the season.
I figure Grove Street Cemetery is the ideal resting place in New Haven. It would be incorrect to say time has spared the cemetery, as the years have definitely chipped away leaving subtle features of decay — but it would also be incorrect to say the cemetery has been lost to time. It has done a wonderful job preserving the stories of those who are buried there.
A large sandstone gate protects these bodies from anything that could bother their bones. The gate is built in the Egyptian Revival architectural style, a design which was conceived from Vivant Denon’s drawings of the Temple at Hermopolis Magna and the Temple of Khnum at Esna. This is fitting considering the ancient Egyptians were masters on the subject of death. The top of the gate has the simultaneously harrowing and engrossing inscription, “The dead shall be raised.”
The declaration fills me with the conviction of the living. “The dead shall be raised.” We, as those who are living, have always had a fascination with those who are dead. This stirs my spirit into a frenzy of urgency. “I need to succeed in my classes, I need to try that pastry in Atticus, I need to call my mom more.” Death — as an event in our lives — is terrifying, and we keep ourselves at arms length, only allowing it to grace us slightly when we lose a loved one. However, we transfix ourselves on death when it is portrayed as a separate entity, letting it wrap us in its beguiling complexities without being directly damaged by it.
This curiosity is abundant in our literature, our religions and our popular culture. The death and restoration of Lazarus of Bethany in the Gospel of John, a scene that has allowed followers of the religion to evade the fear of death. That gory scene in Inferno where Dante and Virgil encounter a bloodied man with parts of his face cut off, but the poetic terza rima allows the reader to get close to the story without being appalled. Jack in “The Titanic,” his lifeless body frozen next to Rose in the northern Atlantic, brings members of the audience to tears. All of these scenes are harrowing in reality, but under the shield of art we are allowed to feel the emotions of the scenes, find them beautiful even. Cemeteries allow us this proximity as well.
Death, when divorced from mourning, takes on a new meaning — allowing us to bear the weight of different emotions. These emotions are hard to reach otherwise, different shades of grief and sadness that lurk in the depths of our humanity. Cemeteries allow for this separation between mourning and death.
When I began exploring cemeteries, I was scared I would end up haunted — that in stirring around the cemetery I would find a lingering phantom to take space in my sinews, filling my sleep to haunt me. But over time, cemeteries have become a liminal space in which I can suspend myself between my life while also facing the fact that one day my flesh will join the earth again.