It’s that time of year. Not Thanksgiving. Not Chanukah. Rather it’s that time of year when I’m asked about providing “perpetual” care for my grandparents’ cemetery plots.
These annual cemetery solicitation letters cause profound rumination and consternation. In some ways, this question of eternal care is bigger than Yom Kippur, which only affects my life, and that, just for the one year . . . unless, of course, I screw up big time; in which case I’m kaput, finito!
But the fate of these two cemetery plots . . . Well, that’s huge. It overwhelms me.
I know it sounds stupid, but eternity is a long time. What will Mount Hebron Cemetery and the Cedar Grove Cemetery Assn. in Flushing, NY, look like in 100 years? Two hundred? In a millennium? Will they exist? Throw in climate change, global warming and sea rise, and the picture gets more complicated. Will the cemetery even be above ground?
And just like that — without fail — once I start pondering the annual endowed cemetery care conundrum, it happens. “In the Year 2525,” that 1969 song by Zager and Evans, starts buzzing in my brain.
The catchy, but glum song tracks an apocalyptic future for mankind at approximately 1,000-year intervals, up to the year 10,000.
“In the year 2525, if man is still alive, If woman can survive, they may find . . .”
— Zager and Evans
With a future like that, who needs to worry about upkeep on cemetery plots? Or maybe that’s the point, maybe it’s a good idea to ensure I’ve got my grandparents covered (pardon the pun) in advance.
For two-plus decades, I’ve taken pride in paying the annual bills for “seasonal care” on the graves for my father’s parents, Morris and Esther Galatz. I have only visited their graves once, but when writing the checks, I feel I’m paying my respects.
After my mother died in 2001, and the first notice about upkeep was forwarded to me, it was a revelation. I had never known about these cemetery plots or had I known these relatives. My grandmother died in 1928.
My grandfather in 1951, three years before I was born.
My father was one of five sons. How it fell to him, the youngest of the surviving “boys,” to tend to the graves I don’t know. But, in turn, when he died, my mother took on the responsibility for 15 years, until she passed.
My parents married as teenagers. Yet, my mother never met her mother-in-law, who died when my father was young. I wonder what thoughts my mother had as she wrote that annual check. Did she speculate about my father’s difficult childhood? Did she use it as moment for mourning, or simply, mechanically, pay the bill?
For me, this ritual is a source of awe and connection. I think about my father, his siblings, and my grandmother’s hard life filled with poverty, illness and early death. And in tending to these graves, I also feel that I’m honoring my father, now 37 years gone. It an especially joyous mitzvah.
But these solicitations about perpetual care? They are an entirely different matter. When they first started arriving, I considered them unnerving and tossed them in the trash.
Now, however, I’m older. And I worry.
My own clock is ticking. How many more annual payments are in my future? Is it fair to pass this responsibility on to my children? Will they take pleasure in the task? Will they, children of the internet-everything-in-the-cloud generation, see value in preserving and honoring the past?
And so, with my own mortality looming, this year I retrieved the solicitation from the garbage.
The idea of perpetual care still makes me laugh and cringe. Yet, knowing my grandparents are taken care of, whatever fate befalls the planet in the long run — and me in the next couple of decades — also seems strangely satisfying.
So, Cedar Grove Cemetery Assn. administrators, be on the lookout. The check isn’t quite in the mail, but I’m thinking about it.
While time waits for no man or woman, I’m confident there’s a little time left to contemplate this annual solicitation . . . at least until year’s end when rates go up effective January 1, 2022.
