Occasionally, in order to break routine, I pick a spot on the map I’ve never been and make it a point to go there. A few weeks ago, it was the cemetery of Zaragoza.
It wasn’t by chance that I chose a cemetery -- I’m a kind of cemetery tourist, which means I visit them for no other purpose than Comparative Cemetery Studies. I especially like the largest ones, and the Cementerio de Zaragoza turned out to be one of those cemeteries that’s so big that it has its own streets, as though it were a town of the afterlife or something.
I’ll admit, it’s hard to really get much out cemeteries. After spending a fair amount of time in them, though, I’m more attuned to some of the more subtle effects. I’ve begun to see each plot as its own dramatic presentation. It could be plain or fancy, but it’s a point of focus for attention, and if I pause and ponder, I get a particular kind of feeling, like the weight of biography is upon me. This is a little easier to do if the marker is simpler, and isn’t dated by arcane iconography or any hints about the personal idiosyncrasies of the deceased.
When they are, it can be hard not to be pulled from the abstract and poetic back into the banal and silly. In a major Boston cemetery, there’s a sepulcher for a man who designed the machine that made sowing shoes uppers onto soles much quicker; over the entrance there is a depiction of it in low-relief that makes it look like a high-powered microscope as drawn by Jack Kirby. It’s hard to look at it and think about the man as anything more than an industrialist.
Then there’s dated imagery. In the oldest graveyards in Boston, just the way the markers look can remind you how remote the long-dead of history are. One common theme from Boston’s earlier cemeteries is a stylized skull that brings to mind the Mexican Day of the Dead more than New England, and then there are also often weeping willows and other outdated, now-meaningless signs. They all put the person in a time and place, and make it harder to relate to them.
The conclusion I draw here is that graves just don’t age well. Why would they? They are supposed to be an everlasting representation of you, but what, really, is going to do that adequately? That’s why I want to be cremated. That way, there won’t be any chance that a passerby might stop at my eternal resting place a hundred years from now and mutter to themselves, “Gosh, isn’t that tacky.”
Anyway, judge for yourself.
