The Graveyard Neighborhood
The Graveyard Neighborhood
Michelle Van Loon
I miss my old, peculiar neighbors in Barrington, Illinois. They were quick to introduce themselves, very quiet, and always kept their yards well-tended. These model neighbors made a significant impression on me as I took my daily stroll through Evergreen Cemetery which occupied the plot next door—as it turns out, all my neighbors were deceased.
Evergreen’s aged trees sheltered orderly rows of tombstones in the oldest part of the cemetery. Some of those graves dated back more than 150 years. Elegant markers noting the final resting places of prominent local businesspeople and politicians comingled with simpler memorials that identified local farmers and working-class folk, and too many tiny children lost to illness or injury.
My husband and I landed as renters in that neighborhood after losing our home to a short sale, casualties of the housing market implosion that was part and parcel of the Great Recession of 2008. In our mid-fifties, we’d lost tens of thousands of dollars, our good credit rating, and sense of hope about what our future might look like. The short sale followed on the heels of a cluster of other significant losses in my life as I faced failing health, the death of a parent, an excruciating estrangement with a family member, and a church split.
*
I began walking alone through Evergreen during the late afternoon hours. The initial shattering shock of a sudden bank order to vacate the property within ten days was just beginning to fade. In its place, a thick, viscous grief was slowly filling the fissures left in its wake.
Maybe I was praying during those walks. Maybe I was arguing with God. Though I knew asking “Why?” would not likely offer me an answer I could understand, I hadn’t yet arrived at the place where I’d be able to form other, better questions that might guide me forward. I wept as I walked among the dead during those first weeks. The few other visitors in the cemetery at that hour of the day seemed not to notice.
Author Robert Louis Stevenson said, "There is a certain frame of mind to which a cemetery is, if not an antidote, at least an alleviation. If you are in a fit of the blues, go nowhere else." My blues were the color of ink, but I began to find that the thick quiet of the cemetery slowed my racing thoughts. Though some locals included Evergreen in their running routes, I didn’t have a desire to walk any faster than a slow stroll, and I began to make it a practice to stop often to read what was engraved on the headstones that were beginning to feel like friends.
Those names, dates, and carefully chosen words of tribute (“Our dear mother”, “Friend to all”) became an immersive memento mori experience for me every time I stepped onto the holy ground of Evergreen. Death was not reserved for the already deceased. The tombstones told me death would be my end as well. The dozens of tasks and details crammed into my everyday existence didn’t leave much space in my soul to begin to remember my death, much less learn to live in light of its reality. The cemetery forced me to pay attention.
*
When I was younger, I’d chalked up many of the Preacher’s words in Ecclesiastes as nihilistic ramblings. Those words once seemed to me to be a report card about existence created by a weary, jaded person who had become disconnected from God. I imagined they were there in Scripture primarily as a warning. But Evergreen helped me learn to hear the Preacher in a new light.
“This is the evil in everything that happens under the sun: The same destiny overtakes all. The hearts of people, moreover, are full of evil and there is madness in their hearts while they live, and afterward they join the dead. Anyone who is among the living has hope—even a live dog is better off than a dead lion!” (Ecclesiastes 9:3-4)
I didn’t know a single person buried in Evergreen, thus, I had no way to assess the character of the names on those headstones. Was I looking at the grave of a scoundrel or a saint? The Preacher’s stark assessment of broken humanity intersects with his words reminding us that the gift of life itself is crammed with hope. I began to find hope among the dead.
While there are some who find solace in walking through cemeteries, most who visit are there to pay their respects to a loved one's memory, or perhaps to do some historical or genealogical research. In recent years, I have made my own pilgrimages to visit the final resting places of family members. A tiny Jewish cemetery in West Peoria, Illinois is the final resting place of my paternal grandparents and their clan who’d arrived in America during the late 1800’s. Walking that graveyard was like walking the branches of a life-sized family tree. I could stand among those familiar names, remembering them, and touch my own past.
A cemetery visit like that is a completely different experience than the contemplative walks I've taken as I've meandered among the grave markers of strangers as I first learned to do while living next to Evergreen. Without a personal connection to the cemetery, imagination becomes a feature of the kind of remembrance into which every cemetery invites us. A few weeks ago, my husband and I explored a small graveyard next to a country church. It was pleasant to walk among several generations of family members, resting side by side, waiting for resurrection next to the church they’d built and cherished. But one fairly recent family grouping was a sucker punch to my gut: two adults, four children, all sharing the same death date. On a single horrible day, an entire family had perished. We learned later that the family died in a car crash.
Standing there, I could feel a fragment of the grief of a church community mourning six of its own, child-sized coffins lined up next to the parents who conceived them before carrying the family to their final resting place steps from the sanctuary where perhaps they’d worshipped the week before. Those graves, visible from the church windows, continued to weave the family—and all of the other families buried within the graveyard surrounded by a freshly-painted white picket fence—into the life of the congregation as they grieved this loss together, an ongoing visible reminder of the invisible and eternal communion of saints. There is no way to ignore death when the imprint of it is right outside your church window. I appreciated these words from Dr. Russell Moore, who wrote a 2008 piece entitled, “Should We Miss Our Church Graveyards?”:
“A graveyard in our peripheral vision as we get out of the car for worship might remind us of the gravity of the task before us. Maybe a cemetery in at least some of our churches would serve as an icon that all our Babels will collapse, all our wood, hay, and stubble will be incinerated before the Judgment Seat.”
Walking Evergreen for the three and a half years we lived beside it helped acquaint me with the contours of my own grief and loosen my grip on things that turned out to be as permanent as smoke. Every graveyard I’ve visited since then renews those things in my soul. But it was at Evergreen that I remembered what it meant to hope and realized maybe I never knew how before then. It was in the long shadows of a string of late afternoon walks that I discovered hope emerged from the words, “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”
Michelle Van Loon
Author & Freelance Writer
Michelle is a freelance writer with a wide range of published work, including 7 books for the Christian market, numerous article credits including Christianity Today, In Touch ministries, and PBS's Next Avenue. Find more of Michelle’s work here: https://michellevanloon.com/published-works-2/
Photography by Julia Kadel