My favorite shot from a visit to the North Burial ground in Providence, Rhode Island, had no particular relevance to its location at a graveyard. This “THIN ICE” sign was on a tree near the lake, within shouting distance of the Moshassuck River and Interstate 95. There was no ice on the nearby lake. Only a couple of sad-looking ducks dunking their heads into the dark water.
Normally I make an effort to title and tag each photo from a cemetery shoot. I do this for the random chance that someone somewhere looking for a particular gravestone I happened to capture might find it here. I recently began a more organized effort of doing this with stones I spotted at Calvary here in New York, buying full-access ancestry.com New York Times archives accounts to dig up whatever public trace these people may have left. While I’m at it I transcribe some of the markers as best I can, reaching out to that randomness of possibility that someone is looking for the names.
It’s interesting how the only shred of evidence that some people existed (aside from their tombstone) is their patent applications.
For now my images at North Burial Ground idle in non-searchable obscurity. I will get to the tagging and indexing sooner or later.
I liked the more modern end of North Burial Ground (where the “THIN ICE” sign was spotted) but the older side of the cemetery gave me bad feelings. Beautiful, yes, and very well maintained. My sense of dissonance came not from the yard itself. Cemeteries are for the living, for the proper and joyful act of memorializing those whose lineage led to us and to those we know. Those connections, barely coursing through the grainy texture of time, are mostly gone at a burial ground this old. The weakness of those connections, now thinner than melted ice, attracts an acid sting of silence that swirls about the headstones. This is the silence of forgetting, the silence of being forgotten.
Certainly there is plenty of beautiful and interesting stuff out there, though. This birthday card from a mother to her dead son made me sad.
More pictures from North Burial Ground in Providence, Rhode Island.
