I visit graveyards a lot. I think they’re beautiful… there’s one here in Sydney called Rockwood Cemetary that’s so big it has it’s own postcode. It’s like a miniature city of death, it’s quite chilling. But there’s an overwhelming sense of history to it, too… you can’t help but wander through and wonder about all lives that were lived and concluded in one place.
When I visited Salem, Massachusetts in the US, the cemetery there was covered in a blanket of snow, and it was silent. Beautifully eerie. There were dates on those graves from the 1600s…!? I can’t even fathom standing in the very spot where people gathered around the body of a person from the 1600s and honored their life. But I did.
My mind spins just thinking about it.
The bodies of the victims of the witch trials weren’t buried there, though. I think they were burned. But there was a memorial set up with a stone bench for each of them. Giles Corey, Sarah Good, Goodie Proctor… after studying the play The Crucible, seeing those names carved into the stone was just… surreal.
