BURYING THE DEAD

I recently saw that the idea of using New York City parks for temporary mass burial of victims of COVID-19 was being floated. My first reaction: why temporary? My reaction upon deeper consideration: why temporary?
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If I were still a resident of Manhattan and perished from the disease, nothing would please me more than to be interred (preferably just my ashes, but that could be left up to individual or family judgment) in a mass grave in Central Park. No marker at the site, please, but it would be nice to have my name listed alphabetically on a memorial stone at one of the entrances to the park or perhaps on the mall

The ground above would be planted over with grass and trees and not be a place of mourning. It would be parkland, where children might play and lovers might meet. It should not be a place for accumulating plastic flowers and wreaths.

For me a cemetery is not a place for mourning the dead but for celebrating that they had lived. Their lives were more important than their deaths.

​For me such a burial would be not unlike burial at sea: the whole sea, the whole park, becomes my final resting place, not just the spot where my body was dropped. And so I would wish my loved ones, or those who loved me, to view it

Graveyards historically served the public the way parks do now. Places where you could picnic and play. Places where there might be a bit of green amid the stone cold surroundings. For a park to serve as a graveyard does not strike me as a bad thing at all.

Food and companionship and fun. What's not to like?

My paternal grandfather, Jonathan Brooks May, was buried in Hollow Square Cemetery, near where I live today. When his wife died a couple of years later, she was buried in the cemetery in Greensboro, Alabama, and Grandpapa was dug up and interred beside her. I have regretted that action by my father’s oldest brother. I wish she could have been buried beside her husband in the closest thing the Mays have to a family cemetery.
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Perhaps that is why I am resistant to the idea of temporary burials. Yes, there might be the need to relocate a cemetery. I think of those relocated during the building of the Tennessee Valley Authority. But even there I wonder if the large lakes created might have served a purpose similar to the sea for burials there.

I wonder if using city parks for burials might be greeted with some approbation if presented in a calm and non-morbid manner. I wonder if there might be enough families who would approve of such disposition to make more room for those wishing to have more traditional burials for their loved ones at a later date. In other words, present a choice.

I know which I’d choose.