Meaning from the Dead

To join the great majority:  That is an ambition no healthy person should have.

We will all get there soon enough. And realizing what a relatively select society we belong to simply by being alive on earth--even with over population--there are so few of us living, as compared with all  who have preceded us; it is enough to make one feel very privileged indeed.

The Phantom never misses a graveyard.  You walk among the stones and try to glean some hint of what those lying beneath your feet were like, what they believed in, what they feared, what they loved, what they loathed, how they lived and how they died.  The stones, no matter how much information is carved into them, do not tell enough. 

In the case of F. Scott Fitzgerald, the graveyard itself is so jarringly wrong, it seems perfect. The entire cemetery, hard by a tiny church, wedged between two of the ugliest, noisiest suburban roadways, Rockville Pike and some other forgettable asphalt jungle, is an eyesore. 

In the case of Grace Metalious, the author of Peyton Place, a soul no less tortured, a life no less profligate than Fitzgerald's, her grave is in one of the most beautiful cemeteries the Phantom has ever had the fortune to stroll through. Her cemetery is the sort of thing you might have expected for Fitzgerald, a green clearing in a gorgeous wood. One would expect Fitzgerald to be buried in St. Paul or Minneapolis or Paris, or New York or Long Island or Princeton even, but he is not. He is interred in Rockville, Maryland,  (Although he was born in St. Paul, and raised in upstate New York, his family had roots in Maryland and in fact, he is named after Francis Scott Key, a distant cousin, and a Maryland icon). Maureen Dowd says his grave was actually transplanted to this spot some years after he died in 1940, from a non Catholic graveyard, only after the Catholic church forgave him for being profligate and decided fame had made him worthy enough to be buried among the faithful.

Metalious is buried outside a small New Hampshire town, midpoint between the three towns which formed the basis for Peyton Place--Laconia, Alton and Gilmanton  There is no hint of her tempestuous personality and her stormy life to be found standing in front of the minimalist stone bearing only "Metalious/Grace/1924-1964." The stone is so understated you just know there is much more to that story. 

Fitzgerald's stone, of course, is supplemented by a flat stone with the final words of the Great Gatsby, so you know there is a story there. No mystery. 

Of course, neither Fitzgerald nor Metalious likely had much say in the design or even the placement of their graves. 

Down the road from the Phantom's home in Hampton, there are three town graveyards:  One,  from the 17th century, next to the high school, one from the 18th century between that and the newest cemetery, which has bodies from those who lived in the 19th and 20th centuries.  The names in all these cemetery's date back to the town's founding: They come from the founding families: Lamprey, Marston, Fogg, Brown, Batchelder, Chase, Leavitt, Cole, Dearborn, Gilman, Prescott, Hobbs, and you can see the family names start to mingle on the gravestones as they inter married. Who were these people? What lives did they lead?

Up near Lake Winnipesaukee, in the town of Holderness, is a graveyard filled with young men in their twenties who died between 1861 and 1865. You  see the impact of that great national conflagration on a small New Hampshire town, a town so distant from the sound and fury of what was happening below the 40 th parallel of latitude.

You walk among these silent stones and you make up stories in your own head to give meaning to these inert objects. For some, the dates themselves suggest a story: A man's name, Abner Philbrick,  1825-1900 on a stone with the names of two women, one, Abigail, 1830-1852, the other Prudence, 1840-1920. First wife dies in childbirth, the second lives into her 80's and outlives the husband. The story is plain enough, but that's all you know--the bare outline. The rest you need to fill in.  

And you wonder why human beings need to invest things with meaning. 

Driving by the cemetery in Frederick, Maryland, the Phantom asked his firstborn son, age four, if he knew what that cemetery was. "It's where the dead people live," his son said sagely. And the Phantom looked over at his wife, who said, "The kid is a genius. I told you."