A few weeks ago my wife and I were visiting our daughter in Brooklyn, and we rode a city bus twenty-five blocks or so up Fifth Avenue to Green-wood Cemetery. It was a mild spring day, with enough sun to have coaxed forth the forsythia and the snowdrops, and enough chill left in the air to paint the tips of our noses and ears pink as we wandered in that vast land of the dead.
It was not my first trip to Green-wood. I had gone there in wintertime a couple of years earlier to search for the grave of Jean-Michel Basquiat, whose work I had just seen at the Brooklyn Museum of Art. Basquiat’s marker is unimpressive, a hunk of beveled stone amid those hulking mansions that hold whatever remains of some of New York’s wealthiest and most celebrated, its famous and infamous - that is to say, they were wealthy and celebrated once. Now they are merely dead. These neighborhoods are not all gentrified, however; there are plenty of commoners, too, among the roughly 570,000 who sleep here.
Riding With Death, Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1988
Green-wood, as is the case with many things in this city, is quintessential. Certainly it is not on every tourist’s checklist of attractions. Many people do not enjoy being surrounded by the most tangible reminders of our mortality. There it is, etched in stone: We Will Die.
And yet, in this place, one is somehow lulled into the moment: the grass is the grass, the shadows bend around the stones reliably, as promised by the physics of light and shape. The big red-tailed hawk falls silently toward the warbler, and the wind across the pond called Sylvan Water writes in a script known only to the goddesses of nature.
Oh, by all means, it is a place that makes for good copy, compelling “human interest” stories. The Times and New York Post trot out the old tales from time to time, perhaps on some languid summer day when there are no mass shootings to report on - only past catastrophes and morbidities. How about the Brooklyn Theatre Fire of 1876, after which the bodies of 103 unfortunate patrons who had been burnt beyond recognition were interred at Green-wood in a mass gave (according to Harper’s Weekly)? What about the catacombs that link thirty underground vaults, with tall skylights commissioned by 19th-Century tapheophobes buried below?
Something for the naturalists? Consider the monk parrots that thrive in and around the massive Gothic gateway at Green-wood’s entrance. They make for a lovely discordance against the brooding stone; they are lime green, tropical green, thrilled in their bird-hearts to swoop or flit in the airy spaces all around. The legend goes that there was a surge in the monk parrot population in the mountains of Argentina, roughly sixty years ago. Among that country’s strategies for reducing their numbers was to export millions of parrots to the U.S. to be sold as pets. Supposedly, the ancestors of the Green-wood clan were accidentally freed when their crate broke open at JFK Airport. I suppose one might say that they have embraced their refugee identity and prospered.
The stories offered by this place, I do understand. But I understand nothing of death, which - whether I like it or not - is the prevailing theme here. Like most ordinary people, I am simply afraid of it. When I was a young atheist, I would hear other atheists say things like “Oh, don’t be afraid. Death is natural,” and even then, in my own mind, I disagreed. It does not seem natural to me at all; what seems natural is to go on walking across the new spring grass, marveling at the small masterpieces of crocuses and daffodils, rather than to lie beneath them in darkness. As I grew older and more interested in matters of the spirit, it made far more sense that if someone believes he has a soul, or even simply a fully functioning consciousness, then the body is merely a casing, a conveyance in which we travel for a while. Hence…what? A cemetery is a glamorized junkyard, in fact. No souls or ghosts dwell here - it is only for tourists, and after all, Green-wood is on many of the lists of “things to do” for visitors to the city. What fine irony.
Otherwise, this place defies categorization, in that it is both more and less than a cemetery. Certain sections of its 480 acres seem almost out of a movie set: the sepulchers, crypts, charnel houses, the tilting headstones stabbed into the ground seem like Halloweenish mockeries of western burial rituals, or a spooky ride at DisneyWorld. And yet, everywhere a silent dignity prevails. The iron-gray roots of ancient, authoritarian trees have no intention of relinquishing their grip on the earth, and when you walk up to one of the crypts to put your face up to a small, latticed window, in one breath you know that this is real: it is the deep, cold air of the earth reclaiming all that is hers. The dead are indeed here.
Many of the names are also written in history: Leonard Bernstein, Horace Greeley, Louis Comfort Tiffany, Charles Ebbets, William “Boss” Tweed… But I think that my favorite part of Green-wood is Tranquility Garden Columbarium, which houses the ashes of some 8,000 people, mostly from New York’s Asian community. Completed in 2006, the structure’s Eastern design - Koi pond, Japanese steps, etc. - is in stunning contrast to the Victorian weightiness of the rest of the grounds. I like to save it for the final stop on my “tour.” The last time, this past April, as I sat alone (my wife and daughter had gone to use the rest room at the gate) on a cushioned bench and watched a robin hopping about near the glass pyramid outside, I could hear a woman praying softly in an adjoining room. It may have been a Buddhist sutra or a Catholic prayer, for all I knew, as I did not know the language.
I went to the door and peeped in.
She was elegantly dressed in a trim gold waistcoat and pink skirt; her hair was very black with strains of white. On either side of her were two children, a boy and a girl, perhaps five or six years old. All three sat facing an encased urn, their heads bowed. Abruptly, sensing my presence, the little girl turned and looked directly at me, her deep-brown eyes and cinder-black hair catching the gentle light from above. She smiled at me and gave a little wave.
I smiled back, but then realizing my own awkwardness, I turned quietly and exited.
We decided to take the subway back my daughter’s apartment, and within a few minutes we found ourselves squeezed among the other passengers, hurtling towards the tumult of the city.
Tranquility Garden Columbarium