(Images: Courtney Cushing Kiernat)
Like many of us, I have walked the winding roads of Lakewood Cemetery, especially during COVID, and I have attended memorials in the spectacular mosaic-lined mini-Byzantine chapel. But I had never had an occasion to go into the mausoleums.
That changed when I visited Lakewood during Doors Open, the annual weekend event in Minneapolis that allows people to peer into places that aren’t normally open to the public, say the Minneapolis Traffic Management Center or the Federal Reserve Bank, or mysterious buildings like the Scottish Rite Temple, the Romanesque behemoth that is on the Historic Register and has graced the corner of Dupont and Franklin for more than a century.
Having anchored the corner of Girard and Lincoln for just under half a century, and knowing that our time to move, or move on, is drawing near, it’s probably no surprise that Jim and I were drawn to visit the open doors of Lakewood Cemetery. (Rest assured, the doors to the crypts and vaults remained firmly closed.)
It was a picture-perfect day, a few clouds in a deep blue sky, warm enough in the sun to bask, but still cool enough to extend the bloom time of flowering trees and the 50,000 tulips planted on the grounds. Yes, 50,000 blooming tulips.
Trigger alert: stop reading now if you haven’t already, because this next part may sound — deadly.
The tulips were lovely and the mosaic-lined chapel as dazzling as ever, but it was the sun-filled bays and soaring ceilings of the contemporary Garden Mausoleum, designed by award-winning HGA architects — and HLP neighbors — Joan Soranno and John Cook, that made me feel I could live here forever. Well, you know.
This end game has been a bit of a dilemma for me because Jim, my spouse of 60 years, is very romantic about returning to the earth. He already owns a hillside plot in Lakewood and envisions a majestic tombstone and a very long nap in the soil, never mind the requirement for concrete vaults to keep the ground above him from sinking. He’ll work his way around that, he says, one way or another.
Meanwhile, I’m committed to the versatility of ashes. Some here, some there. No dark tomb for me; let’s get it over and done.
Granted, the eco side of cremation is not good. All that wasted heat and a heavy carbon footprint to boot. But I want no monument or plot, so that shrinks the footprint. And yes, there are green options, but when transitioning to eternity, I’m a bit of a traditionalist.
So there we were, like kids on a college tour, trying to envision ourselves fitting into this place. Not to go full ghoul here, but in one columbarium I spotted the niche of beloved comic Dudley Riggs, and in another, the niche where the ashes of a friend reside, the most fun-loving and generous woman I have ever known. And there was an empty niche next to her. If I act quickly, I can choose my suite mates.
“We don’t have to spend eternity in the same bedroom, so to speak.”
And here’s the thing: Jim and I don’t have to be in the same bedroom, so to speak. He can recite poetry to the microbes and I can party with my pals in the award-winning house of my dreams. Yet we are in close enough proximity that should our children or their children choose to pay us a visit, there’s only a knoll between us.
I am not being facetious or ghoulish. I will turn 80 in September, and it’s past time to figure these things out.
In previous visits to Lakewood I’d been struck by the beauty of the sheltering oaks and awed by the spiritual presence of leaders like Paul and Sheila Wellstone. But I’d never thought about making my forever home so close to my temporal home.
I write not to bury myself, but to praise Lakewood. How lucky we are to have this welcoming campus just a stone’s throw away, in Uptown no less, where Hennepin comes to a dead end.
Susan Lenfestey writes for the Hill & Lake Press. She lives in Lowry Hill.
