Modern Parenting BC: Ceremony at Sleepy Hollow

Almost as soon as Felix got his cancer diagnosis and I started thinking about mortality, I knew I wanted to buy a plot at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Concord, MA. Felix had wanted to move back to his beloved Concord and made many trips in his last weeks and months. This was not the way I wanted him to return home but I knew he needed to be here.

Sleepy Hollow is also hard to get a plot in, though not as hard as Forefathers Burying Ground, because you have to be a current or former Concord resident.

When I went to the cemetery office to pick out the plot in the newest section, The Knolls, I couldn't believe the location. It was literally in the backyard of the house where we lived when Frankie was born. The very first neighbors we met the day we moved in, the Mercer family, became good friends and still live there. Todd and Zy Mercer were some of Felix's closest friends.

I knew the area well. It was Asparagus Farm at the time but a path through the woods connected it to the oldest parts of Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. Felix would play there as a kid, and explore it as a teenager. We picked out a spot under a tree near what would become the Ivy Path. Felix would be the first burial in this new section.

On the day of the funeral, we brought Felix's engraved wooden urn to his burial site for a more casual ceremony.

And placed flowers at his gravesite

We started by casually telling stories about the location of his burial.

Asparagus Farm in 1999

One time Papa brought Felix and David bike riding through the path behind Asparagus Farm into Sleepy Hollow. Papa, of course, found someone to talk to in the cemetery and talked for a long time with them. It didn't matter if he knew them or they were a stranger, Papa could talk for hours to anyone. The boys got bored and rode off on their bikes.

When they returned Papa was gone!

The path in the woods to Sleepy Hollow

In the meantime Papa came back to see if the boys were home. Adventure ensued as both sides frantically searched for each other through the steep, winding paths of Sleepy Hollow while darkness approached.

We were all eventually reunited.

Papa returning to see if the boys were home

We continued with a couple more readings. First Felix's Aunt Sarah, my sister, read Thoreau's Flute by Louisa May Alcott:

We, sighing, said, “Our Pan is dead;
His pipe hangs mute beside the river; —
Around his wistful sunbeams quiver,
But Music’s airy voice is fled.
Spring mourns as for untimely frost;
The bluebird chants a requiem;
The willow-blossom waits for him; —
The Genius of the wood is lost.

Then from the flute, untouched by hands,
There came a low, harmonious breath:
“For such as he there is no death; —
His life the eternal life commands;
Above man’s aims his nature rose:
The wisdom of a just continent,
And tuned to poetry Life’s prose.

“Haunting the hills, the stream, the wild,
Swallow and aster, lake and pine,
To him grew human or divine, —
Fit mates for this large-hearted child.
Such homage Nature ne’er forgets,
And yearly on the coverlid
’Neath which her darling lieth hid
Will write his name in violets.

To him no vain regrets belong,
Whose soul, that finer instrument,
Gave to the world no poor lament,
But wood-notes ever sweet and strong.
O lonely friend! he still will be
A potent presence, though unseen, —
Steadfast, sagacious, and serene:
Seek not for him, — he is with thee.