Every day, as I walk to campus, I pass a familiar brown sandstone gate, its regularly spaced pillars briefly constricting the sidewalk. It rises just above eye level, revealing only the trees peeking their leaves out from above alongside an occasional lichen-covered obelisk.

Usually I pass to the west, where in the wall’s morning shade lies the path, littered with pine needles and fallen leaves. Sometimes I take the route to the east, a line of maple sentinels standing guard, casting shadows over the back-set wall. The only gap in the solid sandstone is the open-fenced south side, with an Egyptian revivalist pylon standing in incongruous opposition with the rest of the neo-gothic campus.

I’ve only ever entered the enclosure once or twice in my four years at Yale. The Grove Street Cemetery is an integral part of college life, yet one which rarely takes center stage.

Though the Grove Street Cemetery’s role in campus life feels eternal, it has only been at the heart of campus for under a decade — and it nearly looked very different. For most of Yale’s history, since the cemetery was founded in 1797 and since its walls were built in the 1840s, Grove Street stood in apposition with Yale’s college, the graveyard in the north and the campus in the south. The necropolis may have faced the metropolis, but its silhouette did not define Yale’s geography. When the new colleges were being built, however, this changed, prompting proposals to tear down the imposing wall and to open up a path for students through the hallowed lanes.

Eight years after the new colleges opened their gates, I am glad the Grove Street walls stay closed. I am existentially terrified of death, yet I find comfort in the graveyard, in its forbidding walls and in its disruption to my daily routine.

Over my time in college, I’ve grown from disregarding the cemetery to loving it. Its silhouette defines the barbell shape of Yale’s distinctive humanities campus and Science Hill, yet the contents of its perimeter rarely play a part in campus culture. While Yale continues to expand, growing the scope and ambition of its intellectual project and physical New Haven metropolitan footprint, at its heart the necropolis lies flat, unchanging and eternal save for the trees which annually blanket it with leaves.

In a place filled with fleeting youth, us undergraduates ready to go forth to change the world after our four years, Death lives ageless in Grove Street’s avenues. The tombstones there record the entire span of New Haven history, recording the names of the founder of the first English settlement in New Haven and three eponyms of Yale residential colleges, to name a few. A visitor can even find the names of the current great professors John Gaddis and Toni Dorfman, whose shared memorial stone was mistakenly erected while they still live.

As I walk back and forth each day, sometimes with an earbud in my ear or a book in my hand or a friend at my side, it becomes so easy to get absorbed in my mundane concerns and forget the corpses which lie to my side. And this forgetting is precisely what I have grown to love. Death becomes a silent companion on my daily walks, yet it is a defanged and impersonal force which accompanies me. It is something for me to ponder as I look at the sandstone wall separating my world from its own, and it is something for me to ignore when I am enjoying life.

I know Death is not a personified force, the serene and benevolent companion of Emily Dickinson in her carriage. True, lower-case death, the great nothingness which may not arrive tomorrow, but one day will, is terrifying. This is the death which has come for the people whose bones below Grove Street bear witness to what once were vibrant mortal lives. But when I walk past the Grove Street Cemetery each day, it’s not the real death which I ponder, but rather the sterile, friendly personified Death. This is, of course, the beauty of All Hallows’ Eve. By embracing the morbid, the creepy, the frightening, we defang death.

“Don’t mind me,” Death seems to say when I pass by the brown stone walls. “I was here yesterday; I’ll be right here tomorrow. We can reschedule our chat if you want.”

And so I nod my head in acknowledgement as I walk past Death’s abode, and I continue living, my calendar packed as I’ll allow, while Death’s remains wide open, waiting.

BEN ROSENTHAL is a senior in Morse College studying History and Ancient Egyptian. He can be reached at benjamin.rosenthal@yale.edu.