Shortcut

After too many years of planning and too many months of construction, a new exit has gone into I-696, the highway that cuts across the top of Detroit, the new faultline between Detroit and its older inner suburbs and Oakland and its exurbian McMansions. The new exit feeds into Franklin Road, an old and picturesque road that leads to many of the more tony and tasteful neighbourhoods of Oakland County. For those of us who live south of I-696 but between Telegraph and Orchard Lake Road, the new exit saves plenty of time.

The catch? You have to make a shortcut through the back gates of Holy Sepulchre Cemetery. During the week, the back door is always open but on weekends, the guards get sneeky and shut it at arbitrary times, no doubt to keep the likes of me off balance and hence off the premises.

Nonetheless, I use this shortcut whenever I can. And the more I use it, the more I am enchanted by this well-kept and well-populated necropolis. As someone who has drifted from evangelical existential agnoticism into evangelical existential hinduism via marriage, I don't have much use for the intended purpose of this place. When my corpus packs it in, the kinfolk will send me to the flames and then send my ashes up the river.

And yet, as I crawl (and crawl you must with 15mph posted limits and the occasional Southfiled police car lurking in the bushes) through the winding "streets," I notice that the city belongs to living as much as the dead. There is always someone taking flowers or a wreath to a grave. Or someone standing over a grave, looking down at the marker or up at the trees. Nature has been pruned and primped to act as a suitable, tasteful backdrop that screams the dead are not alone. They are not forgotten. They are not wholely dead yet or ever will be.

Who hasn't been in cemeteries left untended? Just as nature takes over an abandoned lot, it takes over an abandoned graveyard. Who let the place slide, you wonder? Did the illusion, the hope finally dissipate?

It's an old cliche, utterly most famously by Rodney Dangerfield in Caddyshack, that the two biggest wastes of land are golf courses and cemeteries. As an avid duffer, I must protest the former. As an inveterate lover of city life, I must protest the latter. Not only does this cemetery host some of Detroit's luminaries of the past, it is a special space that offers us, the living, a chance to contemplate the finitude and finality of our life and the lives of others. It is part of the neighbourhood, part of the collective narrative of the neighbourhood and the city at large.

A friend of mine is working an academic article about computers and death. Life ever after on the web, whether you want it or not. But the web is not a place. Its materiality is always suspect and provisional. In his fantastic short novel, Everyman, Phillip Roth has his sadsack protagonist visit the grave of his parents. "Your boy's 71," he intones, brooding down at the marker. A moment later, he happens upon that oldie but goodie, the rueful, knowing gravedigger. Unaware that he will be shuffling off this mortal coil in no time, the protagonist asks the labourer how one digs a grave. The low temperature Negro obliges, detailing the process as the protagonist listens on with grim bemusement. Everyman has made false starts into and clumsy exits from the crucial stages of life. In death, with his few friends and fewer friendly family members standing around his grave, our hero becomes a place, a physical place, where those left behind can try to make sense of what came before with him and what is yet to come without him. Can you do that on-line?