Bloor West

Parklawn Cemetery in Toronto

By Sam Mooney ⋅ March 1, 2009 ⋅  Email This Post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

I love cemeteries – old cemeteries.  Modern memorial gardens don’t do much for me.  The older the cemetery, the more interesting the headstones.  In fact, calling them headstones doesn’t do justice to the huge gorgeous rococo statues.  Maybe people thought that god was more likely to notice them if they had a really big memorial.

The condo that I’m staying in overlooks Park Lawn Cemetery in Toronto.   Lots of trees and grass but the part I can see has fairly uniform headstones.  I don’t know if there’s an older section with huge memorials or not.

This morning I watched a man walking through the cemetery.  He didn’t once walk on the road – except to cross it.  He walked on the grass and snow, right over the graves.  It made me a bit uncomfortable.  Which made me think about why I would feel uncomfortable.  It must be some residual superstition about walking on a grave. I wonder if somewhere on the time continuum there were people shivering as the man walked on their graves.

Yesterday I saw two cars stop beside a grave.  Altogether there were about 7 people clustered at a grave.  One of them was a little child, probably about two or three.  Someone leaned down and handed the child flowers and said something to it.  Someone else took the child’s hand and helped it put the flowers on the grave.

I’m sure that the person who gave the child flowers said ‘give these flowers to Grandma’.  I’m also sure that for years that child is going to think that his grandmother is a tombstone.