Holy Cross

cross

holy cross

Morning has come after a restless night, and I can hear the sounds of traffic on the expressway. There is no sense of Sunday stillness here...everything is in motion already. I made some coffee and as I sip it I am pondering the interior of this apartment, whose walls are a dark olive green, almost black...but fortunately there is a great deal of light, so the effect is not depressing. The owners have taken a stab at decor: an arrangement of frames over the table, for example, some of which contain images of the sort you might find in the local thrift store...a matador in action, John F. Kennedy, four jovial cowboys on horseback....but most of the frames are empty, like histories that have faded into oblivion or destinies not yet unfolded. There is something oddly disconcerting about the empty frames.

But apart from minor inconveniences, such as a miniscule bathroom with no ventilation, and a six-flight walk up narrow winding stairs that are a bit shadowy at night, I like this apartment. It is in a very old brick building; the windows are arched, and one wall in our bedroom curves like a tower wall. I also like the rooftop, of course, not only because it offers a beautiful view of the city and the upper bay but because the very idea of having access to an open rooftop is inherently charming.

The weather has been not just mild, but weirdly hot. Yesterday we crammed onto a shuttle bus at a point where the subway track was closed for repair. Thankfully it was air-conditioned, but when I say crammed, I mean crammed, and at every stop, more people got on board. "Move all the way to the back," the driver kept saying.  I held on with one hand and tried to keep my body compact, thinking of the Ranch, so faraway, and realizing what little tolerance I have for so much proximity to the teeming masses. It's official: I am a country girl.

The air was filled with odd snippets of cell phone conversation. "You been sleepin' with her since 2010," one guy was saying sagely, "that's a relationship, man. That's called a relationship." Another guy declared  that today was a sunglasses and Advil day, which seemed to summarize it nicely. And one woman was reporting to someone about her dental health: "It's either gonna be a root canal or pull it, and I say pull it. It's just one of those big molars way in the back that no one needs anyway."

Ah, motley humanity, trying not to touch, near enough to smell each other's sweat, stop and go on a city bus, shlepping our various woes and triumphs, sluggishly chugging along. Eastern Parkway. Brooklyn Avenue. Nostrand. Heart-of-Brooklyn street names, but nothing was familiar along this stretch.

Our destination was the Cemetery of the Holy Cross, someplace I had never been, and I can't say why it was important today or even if it was, but it was a kind of pilgrimage. I know it sounds morbid, but since we were nearby, had some time, and were unlikely to make this trip again, we had decided to visit the graves of my grandfather, who was buried at Holy Cross in 1966, my grandmother, who died  in 1947, and an uncle who died as a baby in 1924.

The Cemetery of the Holy Cross was founded in 1849 and covers nearly 100 acres of land once farmed by a Dutch settler, Rutger Joesten Van Brunt, and his descendants. Run by the Catholic church, it is a well-tended stretch of green in the middle of an urban environment, and it is crowded with rows of tombstones...one online article claims that there have been 725,000 burials there, which staggers the imagination. But I was armed with very specific information provided by a helpful person on the telephone earlier:  a section name, a row, and a grave number. We walked through the main gate and began our search.

Some of the tombstones were elaborate...with angels and saints and columns, and artfully etched prayers and names and dates, and many were polished and modern, upgrade replacements of older stones. We counted rows and scanned the names...wandering through a city within the city, this one filled with Irish and Italians. I saw a Raffaele here and an Assunta there, but never the right ones. Could I have somehow missed my own family name? I looked back at the overwhelming size of the place and the sheer numbers of gravestones. I was beginning to think we might have come all this way for naught.

Then Monte called me over and pointed to that poignant little cross you see above, the only nameless one there. We confirmed that we were in the right section and row, and we carefully checked the grave numbers on the adjacent stones on either side. We'd found it. There could be no doubt.

And somehow it made sense. Grieving and impoverished, my family buried a baby here in 1924, and this rough-hewn cross was what they could afford. It is nothing but concrete, studded with bits of rock, primitive, but eloquent somehow, a marker I can relate to.

And when each of my grandparents died in turn, they were laid to rest right in the same spot beneath the same little cross. Fancy monuments are luxuries after all. That humble cross, that holy cross, is their story.

My brother once mentioned that our father had eleven dollars to his name when he died. I told him that this was further evidence that wealth is not the measure of a man. And as I looked at the cross that marks the graves of our father's parents, I felt great tenderness and love, and I thought about how my life somehow continues theirs.

I feel like I have been walking around with my heart  jutting from my chest. In the background, a tragedy is unwinding and everything is wait and see. Life itself seems so fragile and sad. Mistakes are irreversible, losses irretrievable.

But my daughter stood by me at the little cross at Holy Cross, and that too is part of the story.