Halloween is a memento mori, a reminder of death. It’s also an occasion for neighbors to give candy to children and for college kids to dress up and drink. But the tradition started as the hallowed eve before All Saints’ and All Souls’ Days: the disturbing moment we remember that in the midst of life, we are in death.
And good thing, too. A life lived among the dead is both thicker and deeper. “The communion between the living and the dead is an incredibly foundational principle,” explains Rabbi
Mark Gottlieb,
dean of the Tikvah Summer Institute at Yale University. “By insisting that the dead are a part of that community, we enlarge both our discourse and our sense of what truly matters.”
Even Manhattan hasn’t eliminated all of its cemeteries and old ghosts. Despite the late 19th- and early 20th-century efforts to banish graveyards in the name of public health and some vague sense of modern progress, at least nine graveyards can still be found on the island.
Among them is the New York City Marble Cemetery in the East Village, with monuments marking the underground vaults between tall ivy-covered trees. There’s also Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral, between Mott and Mulberry Streets, with its gray crypts wrapped in the protection of a red brick wall.
Perhaps the most beautiful is Trinity Church Cemetery, near Wall Street. Created in 1697, it’s where such figures as
Alexander Hamilton
and the steamboat inventor
Robert Fulton
are buried. Although hemmed in by the glassy skyscrapers of the financial district, the old marble, slate and granite headstones somehow fit the small space. A brick path drifts through the grass. “Sleep, Lovely Babe, and take thy rest,” reads the 1731 headstone of
Nicholas Ellsworth,
who died at age two, with a skull and two flowers carved above.
Less attractive, and perhaps for that reason starker in its reminder of the dead, is the Third Cemetery of the Spanish Portuguese Synagogue, on 21st St., between Sixth and Seventh Avenues. Stuck between nondescript yellow and red brick buildings, it almost looks like a backyard lot, with a Citi bike station in front. But through the curled pig-iron fence passersby can see the simple white gravestones set beneath five trees.
The ancient cities were built around the dead, the…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at RSSOpinion…