Ralph Gardner Jr. visits the graves of his grandparents in an industrial section of Queens
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
By RALPH GARDNER JR.
June 8, 2016 6:03 a.m. ET
Have you ever wondered about the state of the graves of long-dead relatives you haven’t visited in years? That curiosity, and desire to pay my respects compelled me to visit my grandparents in Queens last week after coming across the name of the cemetery where they were buried.
To the best of my knowledge, no family member had seen the gravesite since 1977, when my grandfather Benjamin Gardner died. If my father visited he never told us or took us along. My grandmother Myra, buried beside my grandfather, passed away in 1972.
Our reunion occurred at Linden Hill Jewish Cemetery. It’s in an industrial section of Queens, but with a panoramic view of the Manhattan skyline. Though nobody, except a mockingbird and a couple of groundskeepers were present to enjoy it with us on the afternoon of our visit.
While my grandparents’ resting place may have been ignored for years, they remain present in our lives.
They bought our house upstate in 1948 and their personalities reside in the novels my grandmother read that still occupy our bookshelves. And in the antiques they brought with them when they permanently left New York City, and their apartment at the Fifth Avenue Hotel on Ninth Street, in the early 1960s.
But most of all I think of them whenever I visit our pond. My grandparents wanted one very much but were told by a representative from the local cooperative extension office that the swamp they wanted to dredge would never be more than a few feet deep.
He was wrong.
After my grandfather died, a bulldozer operator we hired to clear some land took one look at the swamp and said, “I’ve dug more than a hundred ponds and I can tell you that you can have a pond there.”
So we now have a beautiful, healthy, spring-fed pond. Some 10- or 15-feet deep in spots.
Whenever I walk out there, and especially when I go swimming there, I think of my grandparents and wish they’d lived to see it.
Now that I knew their graves were within the five boroughs of New York City, it would have been irresponsible not to drop by eventually.
I called a phone number for Linden Hill that I discovered online. A helpful woman found my grandparents’ names in their archives and gave me their row and plot number, and directions how to find it.
I enlisted my wife, Debbie, to join me. I have no doubt they’d have enjoyed my wife’s company—my friendly, fun-loving grandmother in particular.
Also, I can’t help but believe that two people make for a more festive visit, even to a cemetery.
The section of the graveyard where my grandparents were buried had seen better days. But some of its monuments and mausoleums were beautiful.
Clik here to view.
We eventually found my grandparents in the last row, their tombstones against a chain-link fence overgrown with vines that marked the cemetery’s border.
My grandmother’s sister Irene and her parents, Clara and Albert Berman, joined them there.
I’d never met my great-grandfather. He died on April 25, 1941, according to the inscription on his tombstone. Nor, I believe, my great-aunt Irene, even though she died in 1958, after I was born.
I vaguely remember my great-grandmother who passed away in 1961 at the age of 93. She lived in an austere Greenwich Village apartment that depressed me the only time I visited as a child.
“It’s a nice spot,” Debbie said. “I’d rather be back here in the corner.”
There wasn’t much to do after I’d read my grandparents’ tombstone. I didn’t try to catch them up—such as by sharing the accomplishments of the great-grandchildren they’d never met, or updating them on improvements to the home they loved so much.
In my optimistic conception of the hereafter the dead have better things to do than hang around a cemetery hoping visitors will show up.
I don’t know whether I’ll return. But there’s some comfort in having their address and knowing they’re just over the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge.
“It was nice to meet your grandparents,” Debbie said.
I believe she was being sincere.