Category Archives: Death In Queens

Death In Queens

Maybe They’ll Win

We were talking about love, we being my family, at a funeral, which is where we congregate too often now, and my mother brought up the memories of people she has loved, in the family and out of it, and feeling their presence, or rather not feeling their presence, which she says she hasn’t felt since these people passed, and she wondered if they miss her wherever they are, if they are anywhere now, and if they missed her then where are they now, and what purpose does a love serve if that love just ends when the person ends. I don’t know how to answer these questions, I barely know how to think about them or if it’s wise or helpful to think about them in the first place. 

The facile answer is of course yes that love was meaningful, even a memory can sustain you in some way, what would a life without love be worth. It is equally facile to go full Epic Atheist and say no it’s not meaningful, people are just sacks of chemicals and impulses and love is no more mystical than the bonding of one atom with another, or a star collapsing into a black hole, at the end of the day we’re all just physics in action. 

If an answer exists at all that answer is ambiguous, which does my mother no good. Her mind is either/or, always has been, perhaps a product of a Catholic upbringing, though having long since given up that faith she sometimes says she’s a victim of such an upbringing, because it has no known antidote, if you got it there’s no way to un-get it. To my mom things are good or bad, right or wrong, this or that, she won’t even watch a movie if she knows it has an unclear ending, the ending doesn’t have to be happy, it just has to resolve to a decisive FIN. Gray offends her. And so does not knowing something, and knowing that it is impossible to know.

There better be an answer, she will say, meaning to the great question of life, the universe and everything, with the implication that such an answer will be revealed in the great beyond. There better be an answer, she will say, or I’m gonna be pissed. And I, who am not sure there is a question to be asked let alone an answer, will tell her, gently because I don’t want to argue over something I am just as likely to be wrong about, I will tell her, If there is no answer you won’t know. And she will respond, No, I’m gonna know, I’m gonna know.

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Death In Queens, NYC

Niches

Fresh Pond Crematory

Death is never far in Queens, the borough of graves, but it creeps closer in certain places than others. One such place is Mount Olivet Crescent, a slip of a street that wends its way up a hill in Maspeth and down another in Middle Village. The Crescent is bordered on one side by its namesake cemetery, a lush expanse of granite mausoleums, angels, and obelisks cut in half by the busy thoroughfare of Eliot Avenue. A few ramshackle flower shops hang on for dear life, squeezed on all sides by vinyl-sided one-family houses and a sore thumb of a chrome-plated apartment complex. The Crescent comes to rest near an enormous sign pointing the way to the parking lot for the Hess-Miller Funeral Home, host to more than a few wakes for family members of mine.

At the Crescent’s summit, the Fresh Pond Crematory looms over it all, a cream-colored slab with a circular driveway paved in brick, ideal for the approach of hearses. Built in 1884, the exterior resembles a crossbreed between federal mint and Gilded Age prison. Cremation was rare enough in those days that a Brooklyn Eagle reporter made the long trip to Fresh Pond after hearing the mere rumor a wealthy German businessman was to be cremated there. The reporter soon found himself in an Abbott and Costello-esque exchange with one of the attendants, who impatiently explained he could cremate no one until the oven was complete.

The reporter eventually got what he wanted: a graphic description of exactly what cremation does to the human body. (“The total weight of the ashes of a full grown man would only be six or seven pounds.”) He also received a defense of the practice from the attendant, based largely on the overcrowded state of the city’s cemeteries and some other concerns about corpses that haunted the Victorian mind.

Oh, cremation is what we must all come to, and it has a great many advantages when you look at it in the right light. You can’t wake up after burial and find yourself choking to death with six feet of earth over you and your coffin nailed down, and medical students can’t snatch your bones and monkey with them in their dissecting rooms. You can have your cemeteries all the same, and set these urns in them and plant flowers about the urns; that will be all right and nobody will be hurt. This thing has to come.

The crematory has grown considerably since those days, when nearby residents were worried about the smell such a facility might produce. A towering smokestack now announces its true purpose, as do the large copper letters over the main entrance, dripping green with its name. Beneath, in smaller, more polished type, is the announcement AMERICAN COLUMBARIUM CO., INC.

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