Picnicking In The Cemetery

 If you’re like me, you’ve been thinking about cemeteries lately. It’s not as morbid as it sounds.

When I was smaller, my grandparents lived a couple blocks from the Freeport City Cemetery. My Granny liked to walk there and would often bring my brother and me with her. We could walk with her or run off on our own, but we always had to stay within the gates. It was a protected series of paths and because of the open space, Granny could usually spot us even from the opposite end of the cemetery. As we got older, we would bring our bikes or rollerblades along and see how many laps we could get in before lunchtime.

Lunch was usually taken on top of one of the rounded mausoleums built into the ground, enjoying the view and the quiet. A cemetery is an intrinsically calm place. I know most people find them at least partially creepy, but it was never that way for me. As I got older and discovered the family members buried there, the peaceful effect of the cemetery was only reinforced. That treatment of cemeteries as a calm, pseudo-park space, is how they were meant to be used.

In most western cultures, when someone died, they were either wealthy enough to have a family crypt or they were buried in a simple plot in the churchyard. The church was usually centrally located to the city and doubled as a common area where people would meet. It wasn’t uncommon for farmers to graze livestock on these fields as well which likely helped with the land maintenance.

Then, in the early 1800s, the connection between disease and keeping your dead at the center of town was established. Real estate developers also wanted land to be occupied by paying, breathing people. Cemeteries began to be developed on the outskirts of town.

The first cemeteries like Mount Auburn Cemetery near Cambridge, Massachusetts, were elaborate landscaping endeavors inspired by gardens in many European palaces. This is where the dead could come to rest, and the living could walk in peace to visit their ancestors. According to Keith Eggener, architectural historian and author of “Cemeteries,” Cemeteries were meant to be a tranquil “Heaven on Earth” like place to juxtapose with the hustle and bustle of the city.

Keep in mind, most city cemeteries predate city parks. For many citizens, the cemetery became the only clean, safe, and natural place they had access to. Not only were cemeteries used as parks, but modern parks were also architecturally inspired by the trends of these garden cemeteries. Swap out headstones and mausoleums for a swing set and merry-go-round and the parallels start to feel obvious.

There is a problem in all of this though. Cemeteries rarely resemble parks anymore. With a few exceptions, cemeteries are flattened swaths of wild acreage with only the occasional tree rising above the tombstones. That goes against their intended purpose. They aren’t the gardens of heaven anymore, they’re 5-minute annual pitstop.

A local biologist was known to say, the two biggest wastes of land are golf courses and cemeteries. In both cases, large sections of natural habitat are made uninhabitable and repurposed for the occasional use of the few. Some golf courses have started to rectify this by planting native plants, maintaining birdhouses, and other ecological endeavors. Why can’t cemeteries do the same? It would be getting back to basics.

Cemeteries were intended to be showcases of nature’s beauty. A calming environment for those interred and the larger community. A place of reflection, and where we can all rest in peace.