John and I have a tradition 7 years running. Every fall, in the spirit of Halloween, we take a lantern tour of the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.
It’s fun. The cemetery is gorgeous (even though you can see it way better during the day), and it’s cool to walk around with a lantern, hearing stories about the fabulously wealthy gilded-age entrepreneurs buried there.
It’s a cool tour. You get to see William Rockefeller’s gigantic solid-marble mausoleum as big as a modestly-sized house, his nemesis-turned employee (I forgot his name and really don’t feel like looking it up), buried in another extremely ornate mausoleum directly opposite him. The grave of Washington Irving. Some really nicely-carved headstones and statues whose names and stories I will never remember but who have achieved a strange brand of immortality via the piece of granite that was carved in their honor.
Anyway. John and I can recite the ‘main attractions’ of the tour by now, but each guide brings their own knowledge and stops in their own favorite places and blah blah blah, and this time, at Washington Irving’s grave (which is, as you might imagine, always a stop on the tour), she mentioned something I’d never realized before: the tree above the grave site, which he loved, and used to sit underneath when he was alive, and which is now his final resting place.
The tour guide pointed out how interesting it was that we were looking at the same tree that Washington Irving sat underneath, and how it “made time feel a bit funny.”
And it really did. Irving lived from 1783 to 1859. He was looking at that tree two hundred years ago. Seems like forever—monuments built that long ago were discolored and crumbling, or covered in lichen and moss.
(As an aside, we learned for the first time on this tour that the reason why gravestones from the early 1800s look old and creepy while ones produced just a few decades later still look pretty good has to do with the material they’re made of—granite, which replaced marble as the predominant headstone material sometime around the end of the nineteenth century fares much better than marble).
However, while man-made structures get weathered after two hundred years and human lives are obviously doomed to expire well before reaching that mark, that tree was fine. It was imposing, majestic. I hope it will outlive all of us.
The whole thing made me think—firstly, about how the seven years we had been doing this was really nothing, in the grand scheme of things, and how it felt short, when I thought about it, but also very long at the same time. I thought about memory—how strange it is that Andrew Carnegie and Samuel Gompers (who was omitted from this most recent tour, to our surprise), and the random people whose names we will not remember but whose mausoleums we’ve studied have somehow become annual staples in our lives, remembered by complete strangers probably all wrong, for something that did not even exist when they were alive.
The thought that didn’t occur to me, but that probably should have, was that we were in a cemetery. A beautiful place. We were surrounded by corpses, but they were buried under the ground. Around us were trees and grass and a beautiful night sky, and beautiful art, and people passionate enough about this place to keep it clean and maintained and give tours and spread knowledge. If that doesn’t encapsulate the duality of life, I don’t know what does.
Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed this post and would like to support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.
You can also buy me a coffee.
Insightful Melissa!
I've visited the cemetery twice - 10 years apart - and enjoyed the tour both times. Such a beautiful spot during the day and delightfully creepy at night. The stories of the dead are wonderfully larger than life and it makes me wonder what, if anything, the guides would say about us 200 years from now.