Cemeteries–in Particular, Forest Lawn

March 7, 2007 by MoPat.

My friend Charlene died Feb, 20, Mardi Gras night. She was only 56. She was from WNY but I didn’t know her back there; I met her in Arizona. But I could tell she was a Buffalo gal–feisty, funny, smart and generous.

The only other person I had been with at the moment of death was my dad, who died in a Phoenix area hospital. We flew his remains back to Buffalo and he got his wish–to have his funeral Mass in the little chapel of St. John Neumann on the grounds of St. John the Baptist in Kenmore. He’s buried in Mt. Olivet next to my mom and next to their long time buddies, Homer and Mary Hanson. When I go back in the summer and fall seasons, I borrow clippers and trim the luscious green grass around their small inset gravestones, and pat the muddy soil down into the edge cracks.

Charlene was buried in Sedona, at the most beautiful site of any in-ground grave I have ever seen, except perhaps those of my Auntie Irene Kane Miller, her husband Art and some other family members up on the Assumption Church Cemetery hill near Letchworth Park, NY. My brother Kevin is buried in a Phoenix Catholic cemetery–flat, austere, sunny and dry. My brother Jim rests in a wall vault at Rosewood Mausoleum at the most incredible cemetery I have ever visited, Forest Lawn in Buffalo.

Forest Lawn is full of marvelous sculptured angels and art deco orbs, neoclassical crypts, duck ponds, and beautiful trees. It reeks of immortality–those memorials will be there forever, no doubt about it. People visit Forest Lawn from all over the world and take the tour of the more prominent markers and memorials there. Even without a hyperactive imagination, you can conjure up vivid stories about some of the people whose “leftovers” are turning or have turned to dust in Forest Lawn Cemetery. So long ago they lived, but they breathed the same summer air, felt the same drizzling rain, heard the same birds crowing, trudged through the same crunchy snow, and smelled the same golden leaves underfoot as we the living still do in Buffalo.

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