Mortality: What Really Survives Us?

Now, now is the moment. This is the time to bring up my visit to Sleepy Hollow Cemetery.
I went there the week before Halloween with a couple of friends and took a lantern light tour of the Cemetery at night.

The shifting clouds of that moonlit evening had me thinking quite a bit about life, time and what’s worth living for.
Last night, Dot’tee broke the news that Tiny had died. It hit hard, I saw the man last week and he was up, around and moving, he greeted me with a firm, strong handshake and a hearty “how U doing?”

I always thought about those who died tragically, suddenly or mysteriously. I thought about their lives and how they lived. I thought about this because how we live will inevitably contribute greatly to the way we die. As humans we don’t just think about now, but about tomorrow and about yesterday. We constantly think about how things used to be with fondness, forgetting about the sacrifice of those who made our youth possible and created a future for us.

We often think about tomorrow with trepidation yet hope, believing that our hard work, our sweat and our sacrifice will be appreciated and remembered by those who survive us. The reality is the future has a way of forgetting the past unless there is something there to remind. That something to remind us could be as huge as a 100 story building or as small as a hatpin. That something can be an event written in stone or a story seared in our hearts and our minds.

We live a life primarily concerned with our own existence, our own comfort, our own goals and doing things our own way. We make a living, create assets, create wealth or create things that we want to inevitably survive us. We in some way want people to know that we were here and that we were with them. We think or at least hope that what we leave behind will be significant in some way important to us. Importance can be measured in different ways, from being remembered, to giving mankind your wealth, even your corpse for medical research.

I didn’t know Tiny very long. I know some people who did. Grief has a cycle, first we hurt, then we think about the family, mom, dad, brothers, sisters, extended family then we think about friends. Then we get together and share memories, have a funeral for our departed friend, family, or love. Then we go on living. That’s why Sleepy Hollow keeps coming back to my mind. I found out at Sleepy Hollow our lives and its message can survive the waves of time, the waves that wash away even memory and knowledge itself.

I saw every kind of tombstone, obelisk, statue, relief, inscriptions, symbols and mausoleums. The tour guide at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery told the story of the famous, the rich, the infamous and the righteous. The guide told of the rivalry between the Rockefellers and John Dustin Archbold, the story behind their huge mausoleums, even to the meaning of humble tombstones with Masonic, Greek and Biblical Symbols. But what was most striking was Sleepy Hollow itself.

Its gentle rolling landscape with hills and greenery, even under the light of the Hunters Moon wasn’t spooky or ghoulish but moving, inspirational yet haunting in an ethereal, peaceful and purposed way. Even the Pocantico River’s gentle flow echoes through Sleepy Hollow, somehow removing it from time. The night was cool but Sleepy Hollow was warm, I felt an assurance in this place I can’t adequately describe. (Even though one of the cemetery’s residents, a skunk did dissuade us from going in certain directions)

I thought about how I want to be remembered when I put off this mortality for an immortal existence. How would I want those who would survive me to feel, how would I want to be remembered as the decades and centuries pass and an ancestor or some school kid stumbled upon my name.

If they came upon the marker of my remains what could I possibly say as a reminder to them to live, love and persevere with all that is in you? I know, but words alone may not be enough.

Why should the dead care? Because all that lives will eventually die. As the late Bishop W.O.K. Gray once said, “You won’t get out of life alive! But the life you live can survive you.” The most regretful thing I worried about that night, before hearing about Tiny was losing a pool game that had been put on a platter for me to win.

After hearing about Tiny I thought about living without any more regrets. If we love, persevere and live with purpose maybe that can happen.

RJ