Gate of Heaven

I had a solemn occasion to visit Gate of Heaven cemetery in Hawthorne, N.Y., this week. It’s one of the most beautiful cemeteries I’ve ever seen — and it is vast, perhaps 250 acres, managed by the Archdiocese of New York.

Touring one of the larger structures at the site, I was struck by how the names and dates on the stones are a kind of pageant of Catholic ethnicities — names that relocated from poor villages in Ireland, Italy, and Poland to New York City, then often in the second half of the 20th century into the suburbs.

On the way out, we stopped at the grave of Babe Ruth. He shares the cemetery with many other famous names. In baseball there is Ralph Branca, the pitcher who gave up the Shot Heard Round the World in 1951. Billy Martin too. Sports owners like the Mara family or Dan Reeves. Condé Nast, the publisher. The right-wing populist columnist Westbrook Pegler is buried there. So is the activist Bella Dodd. Malachi Martin, the Irish priest. Many of the burial sites in Gate of Heaven are absolutely grand in their scale and design. Others are small, practically hidden or anonymous.

I had to carry outside knowledge to those names of celebrities to distinguish them from strangers. What struck me while I was there, besides the surpassing beauty of the day itself, was the absolute equality of the dead, and the equality of their dependence on grace, which is also absolute. Even the gaudiest gravesites were often marked by nothing other than a name and two dates — birth and death. Usually, anything beyond that was a tribute to a saint, to the Virgin Mary, or to the cross of Christ.

I used to enjoy passing Gate of Heaven on commutes to the city on the Harlem Line Metro North train. A daily memento mori that stretches over the hills.