"The cemetery is an open space among the ruins,
covered in winter with violets and daisies.
It might make one in love with death,
to think that one should be buried in so sweet a place."
-- Percy Bysshe Shelley, Adonais
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| Cemetery statue, Sandusky, Ohio 1-5-13 |
"It was a pointed irony that the very best view of the town could be had
from the cemetery hill, where high, thick walls surrounded
a collection of tombstones like wedding cakes,
frosted with white angels and iced with ribbons and scrolls,
one against another, toppling, shining cold."
-- Ray Bradbury, "The Candy Skull"
I remember when I was a little kid, that whenever our school bus passed a cemetery, we all held our breath. According to elementary school lore, if you didn't hold your breath going past a cemetery, you'd die.
Some say you should hold your breath when passing a cemetery so that you don't inhale the spirits of the dead. Another twist is that if you don't hold your breath, the cemetery spirits will steal it from you as you pass by. Which means you'd die. So we've come full circle.
When I realized that I could run ahead on a sidewalk and stomp on all the cracks without breaking my mother's back, I also realized that most superstitions are baloney.
My mother's back is fine, and I don't hold my breath past cemeteries anymore. Instead, I usually look hard across their topography, scanning for statues standing up taller than the other monuments. Quite often, I drive right between the gates and breathe freely and deeply while I have a look around.
I have a thing for cemetery statues. I don't know what it is. The rest of the graves and monuments don't excite me all that much and I don't have a weird obsession with death. But the statues get me every time. Not the same old, same old garden variety cherubs or Virgin Mary's that people buy at Home Depot or wherever. I'm talking about big statues. Old statues. The ones that tower over everything else like they're standing sentinel over whoever is buried beneath them, and everyone else in the yard as well.
Sometimes my son Sam drives me on my cemetery scouting missions. I like this because he can man the wheel while I focus all of my attention on looking. He is a good sport about it, and sits in the driver's seat sipping his Starbucks venti-blah-blah-decaf-blah-blah-no-whip-blah-blah-latte, texting and listening to the radio while I jump in and out of the car to take pictures.
I had to climb a snow-covered hill to get to this statue. I felt like a little kid scrambling up a sledding slope. The air was bracingly cold, the trees stripped to their bare bones, like filigree against an impossibly blue winter sky. My fingers went numb and I got covered in snow up to my knees as I stumbled back down the hill in long, loping strides, holding my camera above my head to keep it out of the snow.
When I got back to the car, I was definitely a little breathless -- but not because the cemetery spirits stole anything from me. Breathless because I'm 46 and just climbed up and down a snowy hill in 20-degree weather. Breathless because I was baldly rejecting superstition and inhaling lungful after lungful of sharp, cold cemetery air.
Breathless because it's good thing to be alive.
