Article by Margalit Goldberg Art by Aiden Ingenthron
“Hold your breath so you don’t let the ghosts in,” my friend instructed as we drove towards my home and approached the turn onto my street. I was eight years old and thoroughly confused. Everybody knew that you had to hold your breath while you drove through tunnels– Eisenhower Tunnel on I-70 being the toughest and therefore most important feat to prove your capabilities– but past a cemetery? I realized that if it was true, that you could breathe in ghosts, I would be thoroughly haunted by now. And if I was haunted by anything, it was by the violence of living people in the world, not the dead. This was one of those moments where you see clearly into someone’s life and their relationship with the world, and it looks nothing like yours.
I’ve lived my entire life half a block away from a cemetery. I can recall the names on the headstones that can be seen through the chain-link fence that I’ve passed innumerable times: Melmud, Cohn, Jacobs. I still wonder why the owner of the headstone carving storefront got up and left one day. And I always return to wander the paths near my house when I’m back home. Fairmount Cemetery is as saturated into my life as any of the schools I’ve attended. My mom would drive me around the cemetery when I was a baby and couldn’t sleep, letting the quietude of death soothe the new life she had brought into the world. We would take family walks through the plots, mostly admiring the fall colors. I even attended a summer camp where we took headstone etchings and then wrote a story about the person we chose. As I got older and started to grasp the concept of death, I understood the intended purpose of the space, but it was never haunted to me.
When I was in high school, we’d jump the fence and play hide and seek until the night patrol came. We would stumble, drunkenly laughing, through the headstones until we found the fence and scrambled back over, trying not to rip our clothes. We did this until my friend got locked in the mausoleum and we had become aware enough to question if this was too disrespectful of a shenanigan. I had my first kiss on one of those nights, nervous and giddy and wondering what everyone would think of me, including the bodies that lay below my feet.
The cemetery was one of my only reprieves during lockdown. I’d roll a joint in my room while my camera was off during Zoom class and as soon as I could log off, I’d walk down the street and through the gates and light up in a corner no one had been buried in since 1937. At a time when death tolls were displayed everywhere, I found myself wanting to be around people who had died decades ago. I wanted to be anywhere but in 2020 in my childhood bedroom, and I got away by time traveling to the past. I convened with Spanish flu victims, who were probably just as shocked as we were when they were told to wear masks and mandated to stay inside. I gathered with victims from all the offensive wars we’ve fought and considered the thousands of miles their bodies had to travel to come home.
In Victorian times, cemeteries effectively functioned as parks since city recreational space did not exist yet. They were a place to get fresh air, picnic, and court a lover all while paying a visit to those who were no longer with you. Most likely, that visit was paid to more than one immediate family member, and the memory of their final days took place not in a sterile hospital but in the bedroom next to yours. We are both closer to and further away from death than we ever have been. Maybe it's time we familiarize ourselves with it again?
When people ask me what I want done with my body when I die, I say I have a plot already. And it’s not because I have thought this question through enough times and know for certain that I want a plot so I purchased one. It is because in the early 1900s, my family pooled their money to buy a plot in a Jewish cemetery in Denver: Rose Hill. Now, generations later, I have a place to be buried when I die. Founded in 1892, on the outskirts of Denver, it is still open today and located in what is now Commerce City.
I remember burying my Grandpa at Rose Hill, although I can’t recall how long it takes to drive there. I haven’t returned since we unveiled his gravestone– a year after he was buried in a plain pine box. Jewish ritual insists on the simplest of burial preparations. No one is prepared for returning differently from another, therefore there are few upgrade packages for the Funeral Home Director to market to us. Or at least that’s what happens at Rose Hill, because it maintains its ability to bury any Jew of any denomination. This means you cannot have an ornate gravestone, a casket is optional, and the deceased must receive a ritual washing. Burial, if conditions allow, is supposed to happen no more than three days after death and a body is never to be embalmed. There is no open casket or wake.
Our time mourning in community does not end once the funeral is over. I met so many cousins and aunts and old friends I’d never seen before while I, alongside my family, sat shiva for seven days mourning my Grandpa. It is also Jewish tradition to have refreshments of an alcoholic sort at the burial so people can toast, “l’chaim, to life!” We celebrated his life and our lives and I learned how to make a Moscow Mule. This is what I hope happens when I die. Ultimately, death rituals and practices are really more for the living than the dead. I hope the living are able to walk past my gravestone, under an awning of fall leaves, as I decompose underneath. Only if I’m lucky will they stop to think about who I was.