How does it feel to spend a day in this beautiful spring, away in a beautiful cemetery?
Last Sunday, we made a pilgrimage to the Sleepy Hollow cemetery. It left me thinking. It comforted me in more ways than one. It set off a chain of questions in my mind, and many days after the visit, I am still finding answers.
When I first heard about Sleepy Hollow as a destination, it left me wondering about the cemetery as a place of interest.
We did our bit of research about Sleepy Hollow. My husband raved about Washington Irving’s book and the movie.
When we started our drive, I was still skeptical about cemeteries as places to engage and enthuse. But at the same time, I felt gripped by a certain sense of mystery. The mystery of being in a place where multitudes take eternal rest – who walked the earth in vastly different time periods, from the 18th century to the 21st century, possibly telling different tales and nursing ambitions of their own, wearing widely different clothes, and maintaining this difference even in the way they said their final goodbyes.
I read about writers, historical figures, legends, business tycoons, even murderers taking rest in the sands of Sleepy Hollow.
The drive to Tarry Town, NY where Sleepy Hollow cemetery is located was beautiful. Tarry Town has a small town image, with rows of beautiful houses. The roads sitting pretty at the far edge of a cliff.
On the right – hilly terrain, the trees growing tall and enjoying the advent of spring, their leaves fresh and pure, green and gay.
Looking down through small roads to the left, my eyes nearly tumbled over, and fell into the Hudson river; flowing far and wide, a glassy surface glistening in the early sun light, reflecting images of houses and trees, of roofs and tree tops, and occasionally, some cumulonimbus clouds.
As we drove in through the gate, a big poster of the headless horseman greeted us. My children seemed amused. The office was closed, but the map dispenser had several copies. We picked up one, and started our journey through what seemed like an endless maze of tombstones.
I had written till the above paragraph in 2013, the year I visited Tarry Town and the Sleepy Hollow. I am not sure why I stopped and never continued. After a long break, I revisited my WordPress account and found this in my drafts. I wish I had completed it then. I still have a few images from the cemetery and its surroundings intact in my mind, but nothing like how it was in 2013.
Can one ever get overwhelmed by quiet and calm? I remember being washed over by copious amounts of calm and quiet and feeling overjoyed in the process. We were the only tourists there in addition to a lady in black who was content resting on big rocks, lying down, with a book in hand, facing the sky, reading occasionally. She seemed to be enjoying the serenity and peace. The cemetery looked so beautiful with magnolias in full bloom everywhere that I I didn’t mind time coming to a standstill at that moment.
We visited the adjacent Old Dutch church and its cemetery – it’s this church and the churchyard that appear in Washington Irving’s short story, “The Legend of the Sleepy Hollow.” I remember being amused by a rusted, metallic chair by Irving’s tombstone. What purpose did a chair serve in a cemetery? Placed in an odd angle, the chair was worn out and overused. I wondered if Irving himself continued to use it – in the eerie silence of the night!
We wondered about the people whose names we found on the tombstones. There were many mausoleums, some as big as small houses, ornate and beautiful. A few names that I remember are William Rockefeller, Elizabeth Arden, Andrew Carnegie and Walter Chrysler. The epitaphs on tombstones were interesting, some engaging, poetic and even lyrical.
Walking on the bridge over which the headless horsemen was purportedly seen and even even the strange silence that marked the moment – are still fresh in memory, intact.
We spent an entire day in the Sleepy Hollow cemetery. While my children were happy reading the tombstones and the accompanying stories or poems, my heart wandered aimlessly in careless abandon.
I get stared at when I say that I love visiting cemeteries – understandably so because many of us consider cemeteries sad places filled with maudlin, melancholy and grief. Walking in cemeteries is nothing but peace, a gift of introspection, a pause in my hurried steps, a time to rejuvenate. Far from the madding crowds, it gives me time to be one with nature, reading from poetic epitaphs and stories of people who walked the earth before me.
Taphophiles- that’s what they are called. People who love the peace and quiet and the poetry and history of cemeteries.
I visited the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in 2013 and have visited many cemeteries since then. The most famous people I have visited in their cemeteries are – Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Louisa May Alcott and more recently Leonard Cohen. More about them later.
For now, a walk in the woods.
Whims and fancies 