A personal connection to Manahath
Few questions perplex the human mind more acutely.
As a writer and self-anointed philosophical thinker (lite), I think about this and life's other big questions fairly often. I'm far from a depressed, goth dweller. Rather, I have a thought pattern born from my childhood battle with obsessive-compulsive disorder. Once a thought crosses my mind, I tend to want to follow it to its logical conclusion, and I won't stop until I have an answer that temporarily satisfies me.
With something like death though, no one has any answers. Science and religion attempt to provide solace to humanity in their own respective ways. Art can offer us insights as well—whether that's a moving elegy to a loved one lost or a painting of phantoms from times gone by. While these realms can evoke sensations and feelings, they can't satisfy that universal human craving to know what lies within the unknown.
The human attempt to manage this great unknown is borne out by cemeteries and memorial practices more generally. Death is something that can't be avoided, so why not bake it into our cultures with practices honoring the dead? Through cultural traces like gravestones with names and dates, or perhaps a profound quote/warm engraving, us living humans feel as though we can access a piece of those who die. Granted, their physical remains also typically accompany the memorial marker, making for an intertwining of physical traces and symbolic traces.
I've developed a profound connection to a particular place of memorializing in my home town. Manahath Cemetery, a large stretch of land that sits between Delsea Drive and Main Street in Glassboro, New Jersey, is the resting place for two of my grandparents. The cemetery is surrounded by large dogwood trees and high shrubs, making it nearly invisible from the surrounding roads. I've always found it to be a serene place of solace within a burgeoning college town. Yards away, life goes on, cars zip by, Uber drivers run red lights, college kids traipse by with red Solo cups in hand. Within a swirl of the intensity of the lived experience, a solemn place of remembrance has added more traces with each passing year.
The Manahath Cemetery doesn't exist as an arbitrary, detached place for me, as it does for many of the transient college students who pass through Glassboro. It has a strong sense of place, imbued with meaning. As a resident with strong ties to the area, I've visited Manahath Cemetery since my grandmother's death in 2005. Prior, my grandfather (whom I never met) was buried there. Their remains are now together under one headstone, the merging of two lives into one trace. On their gravestone is carved the symbol of the sacred heart of Christ, since my grandfather reported seeing this heart in visions before his death. While Manahath is non-sectarian, my grandparents brought their religious background with them to this place.
As I've gone about researching Manahath Cemetery, I've thought a lot about my grandmother. With each year, she becomes a more distant memory, having died when I was only eight years old. Memories of her are scarce, and sometimes I'm not sure if I'm remembering an accurate representation of her, or if I've merged memory with stories about her or generalized impressions my young mind made of her, looking up at her and fitting her into some archetypal grandmother role.
This notion struck me when I met with the cemetery's owner, Dave Carter, and his wife Patricia. I told him my grandparents were buried here and mentioned their last name.
He knew exactly who they were, pointing in the general direction of where their gravestone lies, underneath a tree within a circle of stones near the cemetery's center. My grandmother, he told me, visited the cemetery quite often after my grandfather died, so Dave knew her fairly well. In fact, I realized, he probably had a stronger memory of her than I did. She existed in the hazy childhood recesses of my mind, while she likely existed more fully-formed and accurate to life within Dave's mind.
This insight sounds depressing, but it only further bolstered my connection to Manahath. Rather than existing on some relatively unknown patch of land, my grandparents' grave stone now sat on the property of a warm and welcoming couple with extensive knowledge of those buried there. Since I'm a student at the local Rowan University, Dave and Patricia took me on a tour of the cemetery, showing me relevant gravestones of people with connections to the university.
Dave also told me stories about the cemetery's history, noting that it had been incorporated by five of the original founders of Glassboro in 1837. Not only does it physically exist in the town's center, but it also served as a centerpiece of burial for some of the town's founders and notable citizens throughout the years.
The whole history of Manahath is not solemn, though. Dave told me a comically absurd tale of how several decades back, the Glassboro Little League team needed a place to practice. Since Manahath has a large portion of land reserved for incoming bodies, it was the perfect spot, and he offered it to them. With the backdrop of gravestones, dogwoods, American flags for veterans, and high hedges, the team practiced in the cemetery for a time. A driving range also used to exist in town, near the cemetery. For years after it's closure, Dave would still run over the occasional golf ball with his lawn mower.
Dave grew up at Manahath. His grandfather purchased the property in 1946, and it was passed down to his son, Nolan, and then Dave. He says he's often asked what it's like living on and having grown up within a cemetery.
"I tell people I'm more scared of the living than I am of the dead," Dave said, referencing people's notions that cemeteries naturally come with ghosts hiding behind every gravestone.
Longtime Glassboro resident Maureen St. John, a member of the Glassboro Historical Society, also has a personal connection to Manahath. Her husband is buried there. While the death of her husband was a tragic experience, Maureen was able to find the light in the situation and reflected on the day of the funeral with a slightly humorous tale.
As the funeral procession made its way to Manahath, a tractor trailer drove between the first half of the procession and the latter half. The latter half couldn't see where the cars ahead of the truck were going, so they became lost. Manahath's high hedges, which shield the cemetery, did their job of fostering a sense of privacy that day. The second half of the procession made it to the center of Glassboro but had great difficulty finding the actual cemetery as they drove around it's perimeter, the hedges mere feet away from the road and blocking it from view.
While we might never have the answers to what lies beyond the grave, we tend to use what we do have to make the most of life. Losing those we care for is never an easy task, but memorial practices provide us with a sense of closure. They also provide us with a trace of the person who's gone, grounding a part of them in our memory with a physically accessible visitation spot.
I don't know who my grandfather was. I hardly know if I'm remembering my grandmother in a manner representative of her actual being. I do know—or at least I like to think—that Manahath or memorial sites like it provide me and countless others who've lost someone with much more than a mere place. It provides us with an entryway into the past, that hazy area where reality and memory intermingle to create distant sensations. By sitting under a dogwood tree, running my finger over engraved names and dates, looking into the eyes of the Christ engraving surrounding the symbolic sacred heart, and wondering what comes next, I'm filled with a sense of meaning. Ultimately, as we all head toward the grave, we can find solace in the fact that life won't give any of us answers.
But it'll provide us with experience and meaning. Death is just as much a part of it as anything else, and so are the practices which we build around it.
Citations:
Carter, David and Carter, Patricia. (28 April, 2019.) Personal interview.
Certificate of the Organisation of “The Manahath Cemetery Company,” provided by Patricia and David Carter
St. John, Maureen. (2 April, 2019). Personal interview.
