I've always been comfortable around cemeteries. I don’t think my ease among graveyards stems from any morbid turn of mind. In fact, I like to think I have a rather sunny disposition and optimistic outlook on things.
No, I think it stems from the prosaic fact that, by pure coincidence, I’ve spent most of my life living next to, or near, cemeteries of one kind or another.
The term “cemetery” covers a broad spectrum of places. There are the seemingly endless, abstract and uniform geometry of large military cemeteries. There are moderate-sized town cemeteries, such as the one on Lower Road in Brewster, where, even in death, the local ship captains and prominent merchants seem to vie for supremacy in the height of their phallic monuments. Then there are local churchyards, which usually contain the oldest headstones; smaller, rural burying grounds that have served a neighborhood for generations; even smaller “family” cemeteries, such as the Hall and Howes family graveyards in Dennis Village, whose price of admission is simply a common last name; and finally down to the infamous smallpox cemeteries, where a single family, or even a single individual lies in some remote location in eternal exile from their relatives and neighbors as a result of the erroneous belief that the bodies of those who died from smallpox were still contagious.
As I said, it’s by sheer chance that I’ve lived most of my life in near proximity to cemeteries of one kind or another. For most of my boyhood I lived in a town in New Jersey that, for reasons I never understood, contained vast municipal cemeteries that covered nearly one-third of the town’s area. As a kid, I didn’t actually spend much time in them, but they were always in sight, a constant part of the landscape, a stone city of the dead. I think from this I intuited the truism – a cliché, but a profound one – that the dead always outnumber the living.
When I moved to West Virginia at the age of twelve, my parents bought a house that was only a few yards from Mt. Olivet, a large private cemetery. On its grassy slopes I indulged my penchant for teenage gothic brooding, writing a lot of very dark – and very bad – poetry – while leaning up against one of the marble or granite gravestones. But that cemetery was also a source of risky recreation, for its slopes provided the best snow-sledding around, and slaloming around the headstones added an edgy Ethan Frome element to the experience.
When I finally came to live on Cape Cod, the first house I rented was adjacent to the Federated Church cemetery in Orleans, a churchyard whose residents, and their markers, spanned over three centuries. And when I finally built a house in West Brewster, it was, again by chance, next door to a small country graveyard. Over the years I lived there several neighbors and friends (as well as our cat) were buried within its stone wall and wooden fence borders, giving it a personal meaning that all the previous proximate burying grounds lacked.
Now, for the past twenty years I’ve lived in a house that is several miles from the nearest cemetery, and I have to say, given my history, it’s been strange being surrounded only by the living. But I suspect that one day my situation will change again, and I will once more be among the familiar dead.
