Commentary 5. A PDF of the original article can be found here. When he wrote it, former managing editor Christopher Reed—a great lover of plants—was in his early thirties, and living in Cambridge not far from Mount Auburn Cemetery. I always supposed that the worthy dead of Cambridge were conveyed to the Mount Auburn Cemetery, there to be buried more or less intact or to be cremated, and if rendered into ash, I reasoned, they would be scattered over a half-acre or so of consecrated scattering ground.
Thus distributed, through the gentle action of rains and other natural events, they would be incorporated slowly into the richest of loam, changing chemically, but indestructible withal. I cherished the notion that at Mount Auburn the constituent elements of generations of New England aristocrats were coming up together in the same blade of grass—a little nitrogen from the Peabodys, a little phosphate from the Hallowells—keeping company into eternity.
But it isn't happening that way. I paid a visit to Mount Auburn this summer to satisfy my curiosity, to see if the grass looked greener there, perhaps to whistle through a blade composed of Cabots and Lowells. But I was told by Alan Chesney, president of the place, that no scattering-ground exists. Ashes are unsightly, Mr. Chesney observed, and to scatter them around would be impractical.
I tend to believe that because I had an ancestor who insisted that his ashes be scattered on Penobscot Bay. When the old gentleman died, his grandson, who had a full black beard of which he was immoderately proud, dutifully loaded the ashes into his dory and rowed out into the Bay. There, overcome by the emotion of the moment, he made a silly error for a Maine man and threw the ashes to windward, getting quite a lot of grandfather back in his beard.
At Mount Auburn, if ashes are not to be displayed somewhere in an ornamental container, they simply go into a plastic bag in a cardboard box and get tucked—planted, actually—under the bushes. The situation isn't quite as nice as it used to be in my mind, but one can still imagine the Cabots and the Lowells, after a decent interval for their plastic bags to disintegrate, getting together fundamentally in the root system of a rhododendron.
