Still, the place is absolutely remarkable. Opened in 1849, it was built around what's called the "Old Dutch Burying Ground" - the same one where the body of Washington Irving's restless horseman is said to reside. There seems to be no end to the gravestones, and they are here, there and everywhere, 40,000 scattered over 90 acres in clusters and rows and rectangles, under ornate monuments and broken slabs and weeping angels.
Revolutionary war officers lie next to painters and poets, and the gargantuan mausoleums of Gilded Age industrialists like Carnegie and Rockefeller sit just across from the low, sturdy grave of labor leader Samuel Gompers. It's a cross-section of America's finest, and a reminder that no matter how much we accomplish in this life, we all end up in the same marble-toothed fields.
Part of the cemetery was actually constructed on an old Revolutionary War redoubt, and from that vantage point high on a hill, one can see not only the ancient trenches threading their way through the earth, but also the section of ground the headless horseman rose from before his midnight gallops.
Irving's own grave is not far away, and his tombstone stands just a little higher, a little straighter, than those littered around him.
Sleepy Hollow has changed mightily since the writer's heyday, of course, and although some landmarks from his famed story remain - most notably the Pocantico River, which was the supposed safe haven for the hapless Ichabord Crane - it looks more like a run-down college town than a place of historic significance. Like acid rain on granite, the years have worn away its charm, and what remains is not always pleasant to look at it.
And, fascinating though the tour was, I could not help but gaze at the stones with the same measure of dread I always feel when in a graveyard. After all, it's a glimpse into your own inevitable future, and that disconcerting truth is one we'd all prefer to ignore until our final hours (and even then, not so much.)
But at the same time, visits to these places can be both humbling and motivating. It's good to realize now and again that there actually is an "end of the line," that the four-digit number at the receiving end of that dash is hurtling towards us with every waking hour, and when it arrives, it will not care whether or not we feel our chapters are finished.
Therefore, I concluded, it must be our job to pack that dash with as much as we can, enough so that if there is some way for us to look back on the lives we've led, we'll be able to say that we missed out on nothing.
Chuck Palahniuk once wrote that "All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring." I disagree. He kills us anyway. But as long as there's that chance that someone can one day look upon my grave, as I looked upon Irving's, and say, "This was a man who made a difference - this is a man whose work lives on!" - it won't seem quite so intimidating.
Email: janoski@northjersey.com
http://www.northjersey.com/community/230936441_Halloween_musings_in_a_sleepy_cemetery.html
Tags: Halloween, Headless Horseman, History, Literature New York, Sleepy Hollow, Washington Irving,
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