Location: Swan Point Cemetery

The first thing I noticed upon entering Swan Point Cemetery were the bird calls. They multiplied and grew significantly louder once I was inside the low stone walls. Warblers, blue jays, sparrows, all darting about and making more birdsong than I’d heard since the beginning of the semester. The birds will always find the trees I guess. And there are plenty of trees here. The sign posted at the entryway touts Swan Point as one of the premiere “garden cemeteries” in America. Two questions roll through my mind as I roll through the gate on my bike: (1) what is a garden cemetery and (2) who’s job is it to rank American cemeteries? I soon find the answer to the latter question as I peddle slowly along the winding paths between the gravestones. This is a wealthy graveyard, the markers here are ornate and polished, some of them with large obelisks or marble-carved angels to emphasize the deceased’s eminence. The cemetery really is a garden, though, with patches of flowers and well-tended grass and impressive, stately trees. The paths curve with the landscape. There are a couple ponds with bridges and mausoleums are built into the hillsides. No one else is here, not surprising since its 11 am on a Wednesday. Swan Point looks out over Bishop Cove, an extension of Providence Harbor, and at the far end of the cemetery the land slopes down sharply to the water’s edge. I ditch my bike and walk gingerly down the slope, my feet sinking half a foot into the leaf litter. The sounds of the birdcalls drop off and I am suddenly surrounded by the dull hush of a thousands leafless branches shaking in the wind coming off the cove. I sit and look out for a while.
I came here initially because the concept of a cemetery, and a garden cemetery in particular, intrigued me. Why is it our custom to inter people in a peaceful, natural setting, so unlike the urban and suburban grids in which many of these people probably lived? Initially it was comforting to think that most people want to eventually return to nature, even if it is in death. Doesn’t our society’s choosing to bury our dead amid trees, flowers, and birdsong, constitute a testament to the fact that we still hold these things dear in some profound cultural and spiritual capacity?
And yet, upon closer inspection, I find this somewhat troubling as well. Why can’t we be bothered to make places like this for people who are alive? Why can’t we build garden neighborhoods instead of just garden cemeteries? I know many developers add a tree here and there, especially in wealthy areas, but this is nothing compared to the serenity of Swan Point, which could almost be classified as an arboretum. What purpose do natural cemeteries serve then, simply as pretty (but in the end superfluous) picture frames to accentuate the gravity of our marble memorials?
I find myself questioning again the true relationship of urbanized man to nature. It would seem that we want it present but secondary. We are the stars of this cemetery and don’t you forget it. Our names are the ones etched in stone. The Red Oaks, the Black Oaks, the Holly Trees, the European Larch, even the Weeping Cherry are all supporting actors. We want to control nature yet let it flourish, we want it to comfort us and be dominated by us, we want it more in death than in life. Perhaps cemeteries are a regretful afterthought then, an unchecked box on a lifetime’s to-do list reading: spend more time outside.
Such are man’s ambiguities with regards to nature. We want to be surrounded by it yet remain separate; tombstones standing solid amidst a backdrop of trees and flowers. But what we forget is that the tombstones eventually sink into the Earth and are broken down slowly and persistently. Operating on an infinitely smaller time scale, we assume ourselves to be the ones controlling nature when in fact the opposite is true. We are ants on a temporal ant hill who think themselves the master of the world, not realizing there is a larger world beyond the anthill. Once we are long gone, once the gravestones have sunk back into the soil, once the anthills of man have been destroyed and rebuilt and destroyed again, the trees, the rocks, the birds, the whole biological heart of Swan Point Cemetery will keep on beating as if nothing at all had happened. Cemeteries, then, hold a dual symbolism. For men they are a testament to death, for nature, a testament to life.