By the Time I Got to Woodstock Cemetery
A new song goes through your head as older friends get sick
Joyce Wadler, wonderful writer and Substacker, gave Alte permission to restock her piece.
“If you want to lay down on it, you can lay down,” the caretaker at the Woodstock cemetery is saying. “Some people come up and lay down, some people bring lunch. You have any questions, ask me. There’s no such thing as a silly question. Everyone deals with death differently.”
The caretaker’s name is Shea. He is 44 and has a tattoo of a skull and a pickaxe and shovel on his left arm. A friend had it made up on some T-shirts soon after Shea got this job when Shea was 21. “I gotta have that,” Shea said. Two hours later, the tattoo was on his arm. Shea also planted a tree in the cemetery to mark his first day.
I am at the cemetery considering a burial plot. Why I am doing this, when I am in excellent health, I don’t know. Maybe because summer, in my social circle, has included one lung cancer surgery, one diagnosis of anal cancer, one triple cardiac catheterization, and one move to an assisted care facility; maybe because, at 75, I think I should.
But I am superstitious about it. I’ve had a will since I was in my 40s, but that was just a financial paper, like a bank statement, with burial decisions left to family. Buying an actual plot is different. It’s a hole in the ground that one day is going to be filled with me. It’s admitting I am going to die. There’s something final about putting money down a burial plot. Actually, none of it ever appealed. Being burned in an oven creeps me out; I am claustrophobic, the idea of being stuffed in an enclosed box freaks me out.
I don’t believe in an afterlife, but the thoughts that go through my head when I think about being dead are nuts. Like the view. Why should I care about a plot with a view when my eyeballs will be melting? Why do I think it would be nice to know people who are buried there so we can hang out?
I probably do know people in the Woodstock cemetery. I grew up thirty miles from Woodstock; Shea the caretaker and I graduated from the same school, Onteora High. The difference was, in my time, the school mascot was an Indian. “Big Indian, Little Papoose, Onteora’s on the loose,” we chanted at football games and what was the name of that sweet player I hugged, one of maybe four Black kids in my class, who would be killed a few years later in Vietnam?
It’s true that nobody in my family is buried in Woodstock. My parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles are buried in the Jewish cemetery in Fleischmanns, but I don’t want to be in Fleischmanns, I tried too hard to get out. I don’t want to be in New York City, where I live, either. A stone in Queens in a treeless forest of stones, where the inhabitants get a wave and a joke from someone on their way to the airport? No thanks.
I am happy, on a summer day, driving in the mountains. The only novel I wanted to write takes place in the mountains. Maybe this mountain thing is in the genes. My not-at-all-religious father, dying, was comforted when my mother read, “I will lift up mine eyes to the hills.” I have been in the city since I was seventeen, but the mountains are in me and eventually, I will be in the mountains. High-priced plant food. Anyway, I always liked Woodstock. I looked for an affordable summer house there for years. Maybe I will finally be able to have a piece of property.
Joyce
Mistake: Fleishmans is cool. It’s where the hayseeds meet the Chasids in summer. Membership in the shul there includes burial. Live A Little. Die there.
Wonderful piece! Thanks so much for posting ❤️