Hold Your Breath

Death scares a lot of people. For me, it’s never triggered those kinds of emotions, nor was it a taboo topic in my family. My parents addressed the issue regularly and candidly. My dad said he wanted to build a grandfather clock we could use as his coffin by pulling out the gears when he passed on. My mom tells us it’s okay to pull the plug if she’s ever on life support. In her words, “I’ve lived a good life and I know there are people waiting for me in heaven.”  

Nothing brings me more comfort than a good walk in a large cemetery. To many this may sound strange, but for the first 12 years of my life I lived across the street from the Salt Lake City Cemetery. Its more than 250 acres was a great refuge and playground for me in my early childhood. I believe cemeteries are a place of solace for the living. Grief is only felt by those who have been left behind, the dead have already moved on. I learned this at an early age as I spent endless hours on those hallowed grounds.

What is so great about growing up across the street from a large cemetery? Well, the neighbors are always pretty quiet. Okay, that may be a bad joke but honestly, noise was never an issue other than the mowers at 7:00 am on Saturdays. It was a beautiful place to take a walk, both in the summer and in the winter. It was a giant front yard. It was a place I could run to when I needed to get away from the world and be alone (I was picked on as a kid but that’s a story for another time).

I carry some pretty amazing memories from that cemetery. I learned to ride my bike there. I may have started on my front sidewalk, but I mastered my bike riding skills on the hills and valleys of the cemetery’s narrow roads. I also learned to rollerbladed on the rough cemetery pavement, and have the scars to prove it.

Once, a friend and I temporarily shut down the filming of a Touched by an Angel episode. Yeah, that’s right; I was a bit of a rebel. We were running around, playing one of the games we played in the cemetery, and suddenly found ourselves on the set of the show. The director yelled “cut” and everything. I can still remember the crew running toward us with rants of “do you know how much it costs every time we have to take this shot” and “get out of here.” Needless to say, we found a hiding place nearby and made loud noises for about an hour.

I remember seeing some strangers attempting a séance. My oldest sister witnessed a real one up close on Halloween at the site of Emo’s grave. This particular grave was, and probably still is, the subject of a local urban legend that claims if you light a candle and walk backward around the grave three times you’ll see Emo’s ghost when you look into the crypt through the metal door on the large granite grave. The séance I saw was from a distance at a different grave. Not quite as cool as the one my sister saw, but at my young age, it was one of the scariest things I’d ever witnessed.

That cemetery is also the place where I first encountered the loss of someone close to me. My Grandpa, and the first immediate relative of mine to be laid to rest, was buried in that cemetery on my 9^th birthday. It is as vivid in my memory as the day it happened. I can still see the Salt Lake City skyline in the valley below as they carried his casket to the site. For years after that, my grandma fertilized the grass at his plot making it greener than the surrounding grass until she herself was laid to rest next to him.

There is a saying that you should hold your breath when you drive past a cemetery to ensure you don’t inhale the spirit of someone who was buried there recently. If that is the case, then I’ve inhaled a lot of spirits, but I’m not frightened by that. Looking back, I can think of no better location to have spent my childhood. To me the cemetery was a teacher, a friend I could turn to when I needed a shoulder to cry on, and a place of joy and of tears.  So, when you pass a cemetery, don’t think about death.  Cemeteries are monuments to the lives of the people who are buried there, and respect should be given to their legacies.  When it comes right down to it though, cemeteries are for the living and should be enjoyed by all of us.