Prose & Comments: Lives, loves and cemetery thoughts

To wander through an old cemetery is always an interesting adventure, every headstone a life that was lived, but a book we will never read, a person we will never meet.

But I wasn’t “wandering” last week, I was working, participating in the Daughters of the American Revolution cemetery project, now in its second year. The goal is the restoration of the Presbyterian Church Cemetery; the plan for this year was to locate and clean “the footstones” (a marker at the foot of a grave) of the five Islanders who had fought in the Revolutionary War, and this was managed on the first of the three planned days.

Before getting to those “lives,” a word about the process itself — the male volunteers dig, lift and straighten, while the women scrape, douse, scrub and finally treat chemically. If this sounds sexist, it’s much more likely Marxist, as in “from each according to his ability,” etc.

The chemical treatment is interesting because it’s ongoing; the chemical stays in the stone and after every rain does a little more work. Once those first five stones were cleaned and straightened, we were free to work on whichever stones we chose.

I first picked some close to the road, thinking of the impressions given to those driving past, but on the last of the three days, simply chose one at random covered with lichen. If lichen is sprayed with water it can be scraped off fairly easily; with this headstone the carved letters began to appear almost immediately. And that’s a rush.

Alternately spraying and scraping, and then spraying and scrubbing, gently in a circular motion with a soft brush, a long inscription eventually became clear.

It read: “In memory of Mary, wife of Ezekiel Havens, who died June 30, 1792 in the 30th year of her age.” And then there followed, unlike the other graves, a poem:

“Farewell dear partner, thou my earthly all

In dust I rest and wait the trumpet’s call

In this retreat wrapt in death’s dismal gloom.

My sun rose fair but fell ere it was noon.”

It would seem he really loved her and that reminded me of questions I wondered about while doing my family’s genealogy, an undertaking I shared with my daughter and a second cousin. We called ourselves “The Tripartite Detective Agency.”

My cousin did all of the typing to mail our questions to different historical societies, my daughter was the idea man, record keeper and our chief cheerleader, since she was still in law school, and could only rarely do cemetery jaunts, and I put in the hours at the 42nd Street library in the city, since all of this took place before there was email or websites for genealogists.

The stories that the cemeteries told were usually the same. The men died in wars and the women died in childbirth. Headstones for women who lived into their 70s were rare; those for babies and children were many. This made me wonder if love was experienced then as it is now. To lose a child today is the unthinkable sorrow, to lose children then was commonplace.

Did mothers find a way to guard their hearts? And if they did, how? Did they try to keep love at bay until they knew what the future held? Did they wait to love? Or try to? And what about husbands and wives? Were those relationships somehow conditional? It was not unusual for a man to have three wives in the course of his lifetime, losing each to childbirth. They probably knew little of birth control, if anything, and the idea of family planning was centuries away.

In the course of researching our family, I discovered to my pleasure that I was descended from the first woman writer published in the New World. It took quite a long time to locate her poems but I finally managed.

They were trite, unoriginal, sentimental and filled with a kind of programmed religiosity. With one exception: What came through clearly, communicated with a startling and personal clarity, was her terror when she discovered herself pregnant.

There was no “Hey, Honey! Great news!” She knew exactly where she was standing, each and every time, and that was right directly in harm’s way. Her first and most compelling thought was to find an altar, throw herself in front of it and pray.

I hadn’t thought about her in a long time but was glad to be reminded —    cemeteries have a way of doing that. It’s odd to realize that each gravestone represents a death and that death was an actual event. It was experienced by real people at a certain time and place, by people who lived real lives and loved real loves. Usually, we can only infer from the records of where, when and who, what their lives were really like. Letting our imaginations free, knowing how easy it is to be wrong, to wander through a cemetery is still a special afternoon.

I was grateful for the chance to scrub, glad I transferred my DAR membership here to Shelter Island, and look forward to the next step of the project.

And to revisit that headstone, cleaner with each passing rain.