This cemetery was my 1st exposure to the practice of some cemeteries, usually Catholic ones…read more(although that's changed a lot since I 1st came here), of putting an enameled portrait of the deceased on the gravestone, and it has fascinated me ever since. When we moved to Bernardsville, I was a young teen, and I rode down here on my bicycle to check it out. In those days, it was much smaller and was surrounded by woods (the corporate complex...at 1 time AT&T, then I believe an insurance company, and now it might be something else... adjoining it currently was still just a gleam in a developer's eye back then). It was a quietly rural burial ground then, but I was mesmerized by the pictures on the stones of people long dead-- young men in tuxedos, beautiful young ladies, older people, and... most poignantly...small children. I remember being fascinated by 1 particular black-and-white photo of a boy who had died in 1925...just a year or 2 younger when he passed away, whether through accident or illness I would never know, than I was then as I stood there in the cold wintry afternoon air.
At that time, I knew no one, and I didn't visit this cemetery often, as it was just another example, to me, of my "alien" status, of being "outside the circle," perpetual stranger. More so than I had ever felt in Wayne. I wasn't Catholic, was friendless (with the exception of a few I had left behind in Wayne), and spent my 1st few years in the area as a kind of teen ghost (didn't help that I was exceedingly awkward and anti-social). Slowly, I began to make friends, became acclimated to my new environment, at least partially emerged from my self-created cocoon. Inevitably, I became familiar with people who would occupy a permanent position in these hallowed grounds.
A classmate committed suicide and was buried here. Two identical twins I developed a friendly acquaintanceship with are buried here (they both died of cancer within a few months of each other). A friend's mother, dead of cancer. A neighbor. My science teacher (I remember liking him, but he could be stern; once, when I got a D on a paper, I said, channeling Cheech & Chong, "Hey, man, how come I got a D? I was expecting a C minus at least!" He replied, in a booming voice, "DON'T EVER CALL ME MAN!" and proceeded to deliver a blistering lecture on classroom etiquette that had me wishing I could melt away into my chair and disappear). One of my 1st friends in Bernardsville, who was actually starting to get on top of his problems and addictions before a fatal heart attack felled him in his early 30s. A classmate who shot up with a dirty needle and died of AIDS. The father of a friend who was a sweetheart of a guy. A beautiful neighbor my age who didn't know I existed while I lived in the neighborhood. I met her a few years later at a wedding, and she was, surprisingly, very friendly and welcoming to me. I thought, "I guess I've finally arrived; the geeky teen is gone for good." Unfortunately, I knew she had a problem with alcohol and she died way too young. (When I told a friend of how unexpectedly friendly she had been to me at the wedding, he drolly...and unkindly... replied, "She must have been REALLY drunk that night!"). My friend Joe, whose funeral I wrote about some months ago.
The small rural cemetery I initially encountered decades ago has been transformed. There's the former AT&T complex on 1 side of it, a large community mausoleum on the other. It doesn't make me uncomfortable now, I don't feel so "strange" or "alien." Friends, teachers, classmates, neighbors-- people I've known, and loved, are buried here. Despite the changes the years have wrought, it's still a quiet, holy and restorative place, a place for mourning, remembering and quiet reflection on the mysteries of life and death.
I have 1 caveat to offer. Recently, I've driven by a few times, and there's a huge poster facing Mt. Airy Rd. extolling the late Charlie Kirk and his Turning Point organization. I'm not 100% certain it's actually on cemetery property, but it left a bad taste in my mouth. Kirk's death was a tragedy, and anyone who suggests differently is missing some essential portion of their humanity. But he was, at the very least, an overt racist. If this poster was actually put up by the Catholic Church, do they really suggest that Kirk was someone to extol and emulate? All I can say is-- if I happened to be a black Catholic looking for a burial spot, and I arrived at Holy Cross and saw that placard/poster, I'd most assuredly turn my car around and drive away, looking for a more amenable and welcoming place to spend eternity.
If they're not responsible for that placard-- my sincerest apologies. If they are--- well, they really, REALLY should consider taking it down. I'm familiar enough with Catholicism to know that large segments of it can be as conservative and rigid and doctrinaire as evangelical Protestantism, if not even more so, but...just my 2 cents...it's not a good look.
