I decided to make another visit to the St. Joseph Mausoleum I had so taken a liking to. It’s at St. Michael’s Cemetery, which is at least reasonably close at hand that it was not an epic trek. With no sense of anticipation or expectation I found the place horrifying. The urns, which previously struck me as playful and elegant, looked like vessels of abandoned lives, and containers of needless memory. Someone had his tai-kwan-do certificate in his niche. I saw it and thought “who the fuck cares?” Someone else’s niche was fully themed around the New York Mets. I had to ask if the Mets get licensing royalties for that type of placement. I have seen Yankees logos carved into outdoor tombstones and contemplated the royalties and licensing revenue opportunities for the team or the league. Assuming they do not already have arrangements with tombstone makers would they ever be so gauche as to suggest they were owed something for this usage of their logos?
What I felt more than usual was the weight of the bodies. I did not even think to look to clarify my earlier question as to whether this was a dual mausoleum/columbarium, where both fully intact bodies would lie beside cremated remains. The place is called a Mausoleum and not a columbarium, at least on its outdoor sign. So from that I assume they house the bodies morgue-style as a default, and the niches are there as a bonus. I don’t know.
Containers of death. Vessels of the abandonment of life. The sense of joy, however tiny it might have been, was replaced for me today by morbid notions of the logistics of death, the escape of the soul from the body it left aside, as if that inferior vessel of water and bones was never really needed in the first place but only inhabited by your spirit as some kind of a cruel courtesy. Even the stained glass felt different this time. While not exactly magnificent the two windows nevertheless initially impressed me as a thoughtful addition. Today it looked like I was being stared at by the living, who somehow control our access to the dead, managing our interactions with them.
I do believe that the dead are always among us, in some ephemeral form which will make itself available to us as sentient creatures, or else through some undeveloped technology.
I could barely stand to be in there. Everything about it seemed cynical and blown out of proportion to favor the living over the dead, while reaching out to them with pen in hand, awaiting our signature.
I guess this should go into the chapel sessions. Hah.
I had a similarly aghast reaction the first time I encountered one of these community mausolea. At the time I simply did not realize what I was looking at, and I had never seen or even heard of such structures. I knew of cremation, of course, but my impression was that those urns sat on the mantlepieces and on top of the fireplaces of the survivors, or that the ashes were thrown into the ocean or otherwise illegally dumped. I knew someone who said he wanted his ashes distributed around a certain part of a forest in Colorado, even though he had never been there. I forget why but his logic was sound enough, as I recall.
Cold as shit in here. Gotta get out of this place. Gotta get out of every place.
