Another sample chapter of my novel Chapel Street. Keep checking back for more!
Chapter 1
RestingPlace.com
June 2016.
I am a cemetery junkie.
My obsession was an outgrowth of
genealogy. As a bachelor with no children of my own, I turned my eyes backwards
toward my ancestors. I traced all of my familial lines back at least a couple
of centuries. In the process, I talked to hundreds of cousins while compiling
my extensive family tree. They tended to be elderly women happy to share the
stories that their own children and grandchildren had grown bored of hearing. As
the years passed, I found myself attending their funerals out of gratitude for
the stories and photos they shared with me.
Perhaps because of all of the
funerals I attended, I developed a desire to visit the graves of all of my
ancestors. I would visit the overgrown cemeteries, thorns and stickers tearing
at my khaki pants and tennis shoes. I often felt an acute, practically
supernatural, sense of connection to my kin as I stood upon their graves
looking down at their weathered monuments. I knew they were all once just like
me. They lived. They loved. They fought. They laughed. They worked. Then they
died. But part of them remained—me. Did they imagine when they bought their
little oblong plots that a hundred and twenty years later, a great-great-great
grandson would stand above them in respect?
Were they looking down at me from heaven? Or up from hell? Was there even a heaven or hell? Or did we, as I suspected, just disappear
into nothingness? It was maddening to think we lived in vain.
How many people in this world truly
achieve a legacy that outlives them?
None of my ancestors; that’s for sure. They were just worker bees,
living in little houses and toiling endlessly at jobs to fulfill the dreams of
men who the world considered greater and more important than they. What did they
have to show for their labors in the end, aside from generations of progeny
they would never know and who would never know them? A tombstone. That was it. A slab of granite
or marble with their names etched into it.
In theory, those stones could last
for centuries, far longer than the once living bones beneath them. That was encouraging,
but what did it really say about them? Occasionally,
a short poem or Bible verse had been inscribed into the cold stone. That was better
than nothing. Most of their markers only recorded their names and the dates of
their birth and death. I hated seeing my ancestors, whom I had painstakingly
researched over the years, reduced to a mere string of facts. A human being is
more than the sum of their name and dates. I wanted the world to get a taste of
their individual humanity: their personalities, their struggles, and even their
small triumphs, as insignificant as they might have been in the overall scheme
of human history.
I found the perfect place to honor
my family at RestingPlace.com, a vast online database of millions of graves slowly
compiled by thousands of volunteers around the world. I began building online memorials
to all of my relatives. I wrote short biographies of them and included plenty
of photographs. The website even allowed me to link them all together by
familial relationship. A person could easily click through my entire family
tree, person by person. Now my ancestors were no longer simply names and dates
carved in stone. You could look into their eyes and get a sense of their
identity.
In my own way, I granted my family
cyber-immortality, which was probably the only actual form available. I couldn’t
bring myself to accept any sort of spiritual continuance, despite my nominally
religious background. My parents were both Catholics. They were not necessarily
weekly churchgoers, but they took their faith seriously enough to send my
brother Lenny and me to St. Dominic Elementary School.
After my father Stan’s death in an
automobile accident, my mother took us out of the Catholic school and unceremoniously
dropped us in the Baltimore City public school system. It was probably an
economic decision, but I suspect it was also her way of rejecting the cruel God
who prematurely stole her loving husband. She attended church much less frequently
as the years passed. In the end, she only went for weddings and funerals and the
occasional Christmas when she was feeling sentimental. Still, my mother didn’t
reject all spirituality. She believed in signs and omens and became obsessed
with charlatans and fortunetellers who played her like a violin.
My religious beliefs also changed
with the death of my father. I stopped believing in a loving God who took a
personal interest in the lives of his people. It wasn’t until college that I pretty
much closed the door on the very concept of God itself. I wasn’t an atheist. Atheism
was too intellectually arrogant for me. I accepted a limit to human knowledge. I
could concede that an entity we could define as God could possibly exist
somewhere in some unknown dimension. However, for all practical purposes, I believed
we human beings were on our own. When we died, we just blinked out of existence.
That reality fired my resolve concerning Resting Place. In the absence of God,
I would provide the human race what little measure of immortality I could
muster.
I began documenting the graves of strangers
when I ran out of my own relatives, starting with a small Methodist cemetery a
few blocks away from my apartment. One sunny Saturday afternoon, I walked
through it and photographed every tombstone. I spent the rest of the weekend
uploading the photos and documenting the graves on the website. Whenever I came
upon a name I found particularly interesting, I would research the individual
on various genealogical websites and include the information I found.
I
found it a very rewarding hobby, much more interesting than my day job as an
accountant at Johns Hopkins Hospital. My primary responsibility consisted of
checking physical inventories throughout the hospital: counting all the
essential implements of modern medicine. The doctors and nurses got the glory. I
got the clipboard. By the time I finished my rounds, it was time to start
walking those same corridors again. At least I got some fresh air when I
documented the graves, and people really appreciated my genealogical efforts. Every
week I got emails from happy people thanking me for finding the graves of their
relatives. No doctor ever thanked me for ensuring that rubber gloves were nearby
when he needed one. No patient did either for that matter.
I also made it a habit to fulfill
photo requests that people submitted to the website. I would drive out to the
cemetery and get the location of the requested grave from the office. Sometimes
the cemetery had no record of the loved one in question. In that case, I would
send the submitter an email saying so. If I found their loved one, I would
photograph the grave and upload the picture to the website for them. They were
generally very grateful. In a world defined by death and sorrow, it felt great
to do something nice for strangers.
Other Chapters:
Prologue - My Mother
Chapter 1 - RestingPlace.com
Chapter 2 - Elisabetta
Chapter 3 - The Upload
Chapter 4 - The Kobayashi Maru
Chapter 5 - Gina
Chapter 6 - Tombstone Teri
Chapter 7 - The Holy Redeemer Lonely Hearts Club
Chapter 8 - A Mourner
Chapter 9 - War Is Declared
Chapter 10 - The Motorcycle
Chapter 11 - Suspended
Chapter 12 - The Harbor
Chapter 13 - Bad News Betty
Learn more about the book Here.
While you're waiting for the next chapter of Chapel Street, feel free to read my memoir:
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