BY MAGGIE BEAMGUARD
As a child, I was terrified of graveyards. I blame Michael Jackson. When his groundbreaking music video for “Thriller” hit MTV’s airwaves in 1983, I was 7. The images of zombies breaking through the ground of a mist-covered cemetery were seared into my developing brain.
I also blame my dear old dad. It was a year after the video was released when he took me, at the still-impressionable age of 8, to the historic Magnolia Cemetery along the Cooper River in Charleston, SC on one of our Saturday father-daughter outings. Established in 1849, it is filled with the earthly remains of many notable and sometimes notorious Carolinians — governors, congressmen, civil war officers, poets and physicians — and a few of my own ancestors.
The Spanish moss-draped water oaks sprawled among tombs and mausoleums, statues, obelisks and at least one pyramid. Think Bonaventure Cemetery of Savannah, featured in “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.”
Dad was eager to show me the artistry and solemnity of the space, but I could only see the macabre. With each step, I expected a bony arm to reach up from the earth and grab an ankle. My fears were compounded when we briefly became separated among the tombstones, and I began to hear an eerie moan from the direction of one of the more imposing sepulchers.
Frantic calls for “dad,” did not produce aid. I tip-toed along the path, certain he had been swallowed up by a grave. Then – “Boo!” My old man jumped out in front of me, eliciting a Hitchcock-worthy scream. Hardy-har-har. “Thriller” indeed.
There is nothing like a heart pounding, legs shaking, breath-catching good scare to make you feel alive.
And maybe that was the lesson.
There among the departed, we lived and breathed.
My own advancing years have offered many more occasions to visit cemeteries as both a loved one and a graveside officiant. I suppose it’s been a form of exposure therapy, fading my childish fears of graveyard ghouls and hordes of zombies.
What jumps out to me now is the stillness. It creates a heightened sense of mortality. To step away from the busy world and the fever of life to stand among those at rest will cause you to contemplate the number of days remaining to you. Far from being scary, it’s an invitation to life.
The juxtaposition of death and life is present in a jarring way in the cemetery of First (Scots) Presbyterian Church in Charleston, where I worked for a time. Some of the graves date to the 1750s. In one section of the land-locked, urban church, there is a playground. Its brick walls are lined with large rectangular grave slabs, pulled up to make space for the living.
The peels of laughter and shouts of the children navigating monkey bars and tire swings among the reminders of those long gone affirm with vigor the joy in life. I think the old Scots buried there would be pleased to hear them.
I’m no longer afraid of specters emerging from tombs to get me. Only that I might forget to live — fully — while my heart is still thumping, my lungs are still rising and my legs are still moving.
Contact Maggie Beamguard at maggie@thepilot.com.
