I Took My Chair To The Park, But Not To The Cemetery

I took one of my collapsible foldable chairs to Rainey Park, where I sat on the hilltop for about 45 minutes. I read a little bit from Cerebus, and then from Milton. And then Sylvia Plath. I tend to read like that, attentions scattered from one title to another, and then another.

…

That was yesterday. Today is Saturday. I just walked to St. Michael’s Cemetery and back. I had not been there in a while. There is a large WALL OF REMEMBRANCE now, with what looked like hundreds of names. If I read it right and if my memory of St. Mike’s minutiae is correct then it appeears to be names of people buried there in unmarked or dilapidated graves.

I went there today with a specific mission. There is a story I’ve been telling for years about one of the columbaria at St. Mike’s. It’s a combination columbarium/community mausoleum. It must be 10 years ago now since I first stepped in to that building. Until then I did not know what it was. I thought it was an office or business building, or maybe a monastery. I thought it was a place of life and activity, and on acount of that expectation I was genuinely horrified to step inside and discover it was a place of even more death than outside, a place of death piled high.

I was happy, though, to discover the columbarium, just for what it was. I never knew until then how creative people were with their artistic urns and the way their niches were decorated. It seemed like a lot more possibilities existed compared to old fashioned tombstones.

Going from niche to niche I remember feeling some small particle of joy in this little discovery of a new-to-me funerary art genre. The urns were just so cool, and it looked like people took some real pride in what they put in their niches.

My positive vibes were swallowed whole when I looked into a floor-level niche and saw a picture of a young man, along with a baseball, a blue ribbon, and a photo of the Twin Towers. I realized that this individual must have died on 9/11. I looked for the cremation urn. There was none. This kid must have been cremated on live television that day, as the entire world watched.

That is the story I’ve been telling. I’ve had reason to tell that story a number of times recently. On account of that I thought it might behoove me to go back and see if my memory of what was in that niche was accurate. I’ve been saying that this person’s body was never recovered but I wanted to get the kid’s name and look it up so I could see if that was even true. There being no cremation urn is not definitively mean he was never recovered, though it makes it considerably more likely. Cenotaphs are not commonly set up butmaybe this was just such a monument. Certainly I took photos of it on my first visit, but finding that one picture among an ocean of countless thousands of images would be laborious, and even when I did find them I seem to remember that the name of the person was unreadable.

The most surprising part of today’s search was how quickly I found the niche. I walked straight to it, as if I visited this thing every week and not every ten years. He looked a little older than I remembered, but he was only 25. This time I got his name, and when I looked it up I found a page in his memory at the web site of the company where he worked. He was an accountant. The page was filled with comments from his family, and the first one confirmed that his body was never recovered. Wow. Just wow. I remember when I first discovered this niche, and how the absence of his ashes, in a small way, brought back some memories of how the planes’ moments of impact, when they actually strike the buildings, feels like a searing sucker punch. In its small, intimately particular way the sight of a memorial for a person killed in one of those two instants revived that feeling.

The only element of my story which was off is that I said there was a photograph of the Twin Towers in the niche. There was actually a glass statuette of the Towers.

While I was at St. Mike’s I made the obligatory stop by Scott Joplin’s plaque. Someone left a bouquet of plastic flowers with a polka-dotted piano on top. It was cool. I don’t think Joplin ever wrote a polka, but that’s not really what polka-dots are about. Come to think of it, why are polka dots called polka dots? Who the hell knows…

St. Mike’s is not a favorite boneyard of mine. It is incoherent and mostly ugly. I also had an unpleasant encounter with an employee there once. I was looking at some of the stained glass in a mausoleum when I turned around to find a cemetery worker glowering at me. There would have been an exchange of words if his attention was not distracted by someone who had a question regarding a funeral in progress. I took that opportunity to leave without incident, but this person was clearly eyeing me suspiciously.

Maybe I have misinterpreted the purpose of burial sites and monuments but if we are not supposed to look at them then why are they there?

St. Mike’s, in its defense, has a somewhat checkered history with its mausolea. In particular the mausoleum holding the mobster Frank Costello has been ransacked, and the structure itself figures in to some criminal element of money laundering (or something like that, I’m fuzzy on details off the top of my head). But those anecdotes are historical relics. Whatever their reasoning for scrutinizing visitors such as me I don’t need that kind of attention. So I don’t go there, and I don’t recommend it to others.