Like the muddy ground in the hills of Green-Wood after a morning of rain, grief spills out into the daily schedules of our individual worlds, the general loss of the past eighteen months funneling down into individual, alienated bereavement. Cemeteries in general are my place to escape that.
Green-Wood cemetery, tucked just below Prospect Park in the Sunset Park area, is so verdant and grand that it is more of an arboretum than a cemetery. Huge trees, manicured landscapes, wildflowers, mourners, break-walkers, and curious visitors make up the expansive plot of land on any given day. Today, the rain clears out the people and the grass, leaving us alone with the geese and the graves. This is perfect weather—quiet, lush, and autumnal. The ground is freshly wet. It smells like rotting leaves and lichens and pavement. Breathe in, try not to slip on the dewy foothills. We eat our sandwiches as we walk. Is this rude? “Flexing on the dead by maintaining homeostasis,” my friend says. I laugh, and finish my sandwich. My shoulder hurts from carrying my heavy backpack up and down these hills. Past the flock of grazing geese, past the purple flower mausoleums, nearby the main entrance is the Green-Wood Chapel, built in 1911 in the Gothic style. It is currently being occupied by an installation called “After the End,” described by the creators to be a public ritual.
When you first crack open the heavy wooden doors of the chapel, you are greeted by a bright glowing white light—it is composed of the scrolls of stories written by the chapel’s visitors, positioned upright like candles upon a giant central altar. After the glow of the altar fades, the music grows to take its place. It is constant and meditative. Then, you look up, and see words. Those are projections of scans of some of the writing from visitors. “I’ve made it this far.” “My husband committed suicide and I’ll never forgive myself.” “I have an existential crisis each day.” “I have survived many traumas and I am still overflowing with love.” These messages, some heartbreaking, some hopeful, all very real, cycle through. You stare up and up until you finish the cycle. “Describe your loss” is the prompt; visitors are encouraged to write their own experiences of loss and coping with it on provided papers, and place the newly created scrolls in any empty slot on the altar. You grab a paper of your own and wonder what you’d like to write, write on your little scroll that other people will read and put back. You write a perspective of yourself that not even your best friend knows, feeling the squeak of the sharpie against rigid parchment, and finish just as you reach the end of the page. That’s better; that’s good. You know where you’ll place the scroll, and watch the three other people in the chapel watch you put it down. Now they know where it is, and that’s okay. Then you start to actually read some of the other writing.
People mourned the loss of everything—other (deceased) people, yes, but also freedoms, youth, innocence, love. COVID took a center stage, as one would expect. Nurses spoke about the loss they’ve felt since March 2020, kids wrote about losing the ability to live life mask-less, and, of course, people mourned those they lost from the virus. But there was more to be found. I got caught up in a two-page scroll written and dated like a letter. This person had a very similar writing style to my own—a 29-year-old thinking about the passing of their twenties. They mourned the turnover of their youth, and a decade that was supposed to be their rebirth, reconciliation for traumatic years before. Instead, they made regrettable mistakes with their career, and focused entirely on the wrong people. Now they’re almost 30, and recognize the increasing difficulty of changing one’s life course that comes with age. Sincerely, xxx. Someone else mourned the loss of the kind of intense, unique love that is fated to last for a short amount of time. They were given the knowledge that they could experience the love and growth that comes with deep, unexpected intimacy and compatibility. But distance and life drew them apart, and it would never be the same. But now they know what is possible, and that it is possible. Love, xxx. “I fear I’ve officially lost the innocence of my youth, and the hope that came with that. Still holding on to the possibility it’ll come back, though,” someone else wrote.
This exhibit is described by the creators as a “public ritual.” A ritual implies a process, a beginning and end, an outcome in mind. Crying with strangers in small space, looking at the same words, writing different ones: it seems the end result is a kind of catharsis that many of us never get to experience outside of funerals or over-boiled midnight cries in bed. We need this after over 18 months of isolation. Whether home is quiet, loud, turbulent, or calm, there is now an overwhelming sense that it doesn’t exist. All that had tethered us to our lives has gone or returned in a way that is nightmare-ishly off. There is a sense of perpetual sameness rooted in jarring instability. Routines that were once comforting are stifling, reminders of how little has changed since March 2020. You have been living the same day over and over again, toothbrush in hand, avoiding eye contact with yourself in the mirror.
So what is the need for another ritual? This kind isn’t embedded in the promise to clear your skin, tighten your stomach, nor increase productivity; this is the one you really need. You need to scream and, more importantly, you need to scream with other people, tear off your skin and let your insides melt in the white-hot exposure of vulnerability. You need to mourn the loss of your life as you knew it, because it’s never coming back. The buried remind us of the past, because they are equally dead and unforgettable. As someone with PTSD, I come to cemeteries to mire myself deep in the quiet of grief. I see clearly that what once was isn’t, and that can sometimes stop a flashback right in its tracks. You need to bury yourself in the rotting leaves and the calendula, underneath the beer bottles and the keep off the grass signs. Bury yourself deeper and fuller, until you too begin to rot. Shed, shed, shed until your bones are shiny and picked clean by nature working as it is supposed to. It is the known cycle, ashes to ashes, Monday to Friday, et cetera. Do you feel renewed? Does this take you out of your daily, your weekly schedule? Is this how to spend planned time off? Alone, we’ve been decomposing alone for too long. It is time to mourn ourselves, and decay together.