Hello from Green-Wood Cemetery (Part 1)

Portentousness, setting, and fate converge, absorbing all mundane details: this pine cone beside this mausoleum at this intersection of Orchard Path and Hemlock Avenue will signal my way . . . It’s a landscape oddly lacking in humility—such rampant triumphalism even in death: the Greek goddess headstone pointing upward, the massive, bludgeon-like crosses and smug affirmations of faith’s promised rewards. The sound of whistling past the graveyard is almost deafening inside.


See that my grave is kept clean.


The Primrose Path leads to numbered lots and this morbid topiary—so beautiful (“life-affirming”?)—is a fragrant canopy over a field of bones and rotting flesh. The effort to create a “resting place” that transcends the temporal world while encompassing said world has produced something astounding. Maybe that’s the ultimate meaning of Green-Wood for we the living.





“Hello from Green-Wood (Part 2)”