By The Time I Got to the Woodstock Cemetery

A new song goes through your head as older friends get sick.

 “If you want to lay down on it, you can lay down,” the caretaker at the Woodstock cemetery is saying. “Some people come up and lay down, some people bring lunch. You have any questions, ask me. There’s no such thing as a silly question. Everyone deals with death differently.”

The caretaker, who is also the gravedigger and the groundskeeper, is Shea Cocks. He is 44 and has a tattoo of a skull and a pickaxe and shovel. A friend had it made up on T-shirts for Shea’s 40th birthday. “I gotta have that,” Shea said. The next day, it was on his arm.

I am at the cemetery considering a burial plot. Why I am doing this, when I am in excellent health, I don’t know. Maybe because this summer, in my social circle, has included one lung cancer surgery, one diagnosis of anal cancer, one triple cardiac catheterization, and one move to an assisted care facility; maybe because, at 75, I think I should.

But I am superstitious about it. I’ve had a will since I was in my 40s, but that was just a financial paper, like a bank statement, with burial decisions left to family. Buying an actual plot is different. It’s a hole in the ground that one day is going to be filled with me. It’s admitting I am going to die. There’s something final about putting money down a burial plot. Actually, none of it ever appealed. Being burned in an oven creeps me out; I am claustrophobic, the idea of being stuffed in an enclosed box freaks me out.

I don’t believe in an afterlife, but the thoughts that go through my head when I think about being dead are nuts. Like the view.  Why should I care about a plot with a view when my eyeballs will be melting? Why do I think it would be nice to know people who are buried there so we can hang out?

 I probably do know people in the Woodstock cemetery. I grew up thirty miles from Woodstock; Shea the caretaker and I graduated from the same school, Onteora High. The difference was, in my time, the school mascot was an Indian. “Big Indian, Little Papoose, Onteora’s on the loose,” we chanted at football games and what was the name of that sweet player I hugged, one of maybe four Black kids in my class, who would be killed a few years later in Vietnam?

It’s true that nobody in my family is buried in Woodstock.  My parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles are buried in the Jewish cemetery in the old resort town of Fleischmanns, but I don’t want to be in Fleischmanns, I tried too hard to get out. I don’t want to be in New York City, where I live, either. A stone in  Queens in a treeless forest of stones, where the inhabitants get a wave and a joke from someone on their way to the airport? No thanks.

I am happy, on a summer day, driving in the mountains.  The only novel I wrote takes place in the mountains.  Maybe this mountain thing is in the genes. My not-at-all-religious father, dying, was comforted when my mother read, “I will lift up mine eyes to the hills.”  I have been in the city since I was seventeen, but the mountains are in me and eventually, I will be in the mountains. High-priced plant food.  Anyway, I always liked Woodstock. I looked for an affordable summer house there for years. Maybe I will finally be able to own.

The Woodstock Cemetery, which I have never visited, is just off the main drag, as you head up a mountain road. I arrive, on a beautiful day in August, in my fire-red Mustang with the top down, a good way, I think to introduce myself to Death.

Suck it up, baby; 0 to 60 in 5.1 seconds. I’m not here because I’m morbid, I am extra, super-duper, turbo-charged alive. I just don’t want to end up in a place like my friend Jack, in a Long Island cemetery, with an enormous smokestack from a mystery factory across the highway looming over it.

“Unfortunate symbolism,” my friend Herb whispered to me as the traditional Jewish service began. 

The Woodstock cemetery does not have this problem. It’s up a hill, larger than I expected, with a lot of trees and some good views of the mountains. A guy in shades and a lime green sweatshirt with chopped off sleeves, who will turn out to be the caretaker, Shea, is mowing the grass on an industrial seated mower. He will also turn out to know — and have buried — many of the people here, including his parents and the uncle who shot himself in the head.

Shea Cocks, Caretaker and Gravedigger

I am early, so I cruise around, getting the feel of the place, looking for familiar names. A guy I had a few hot make-out sessions with in high school died a few months ago; he’s likely in here.  It also seems to me, as Bob Dylan and a lot of musicians lived in Woodstock, there should be some musicians here – maybe Levon Helm, the drummer from The Band, who died of throat cancer maybe ten years ago; Rick Danko; Artie Traum, an old folkie.  I like musicians, though they are unreliable people to date, but when they’re dead, you don’t have to worry about it.

 “Is Levon buried here?” I ask Shea when he spots me and gets off the lawn mower to show me around. “I interviewed him once and I’d like to go over and say hello.”

 Hello? To a dead guy?  You see what I mean when I say my thoughts about cemeteries are nuts. But Shea doesn’t bat an eye.  Levon’s got the most visited grave here, he says.

We walk over to a corner of the cemetery, near a wooden fence. Levon’s stone is engraved with a drum set with a dove, and there’s a pile of remembrances:  rocks, flowers, and a small Arkansas flag. We are also, I see, behind the lawn of The Colony Theater, where they have live music, and which today is set up for an outdoor concert. It would be nice to be next to the live music.  And, it turns out, there’s an available single plot only a few graves away.

  “The problem is, I can see houses from here,” I tell Shea, pointing to a house with a truck and a car and a large lawn-mower in the yard. “I don’t want to see people fixing their cars.”

  “That’s my house,” Shea says.

  No kidding? Sheas lives in the cemetery?

  “They gave it to me when I got the job. I was twenty-two.”

  “I’d like to be around more trees,” I tell Shea. “Who else do you have here?”

  “A writer,” Shea says. “The guy who wrote the movie that the Hells Angels were in, the only one they ever co-operated with. We’ve also got Lang” – that would be Michael Lang, the promoter who put together the Woodstock Festival. “We’ve got a lot of interesting characters here. Those aren’t the ones I tell the most stories about.”

We head to Lang’s grave. It’s got a Jewish star on one side and the Woodstock Festival logo, a dove on a guitar, on the other. “Beloved husband, father, grandfather, brother, and uncle,” the stone reads. “Friend to mankind.”

He’d used that dove and guitar logo on a flyer for a lawn-mowing business he’d had when he was a teenager, Shea tells me, stuffing them into mailboxes. Then Lang’s lawyers came after him because the logo was copyrighted. The lawyers weren’t happy when they realized the guy they were coming after was a 14-year-old boy.

Lang would be an interesting guy for me to be around, I think.  But there’s an even prettier spot several graves away. Am I going to be swayed by a big name, after I’m dead? And there’s a good view of two mountains, purple-blue in the afternoon haze.  

 “Is that Ohayo or Overlook?” I ask Shea.

  “Overlook on the left, Guardian on the right,” Shea says.

I must confess: I was uncertain about actually buying a plot when I made this appointment.  I brought a checkbook to convince myself that I was not wasting anyone’s time, but the expedition felt more like the makings of a funny story. But I feel very comfortable in this cemetery. I see my family coming to a funeral — okay, my funeral — and finding it beautiful; I like the idea of musicians and writers nearby. I can see the mountains, which feels right.

 And Shea, who is such a good storyteller, so devoted to the place, is only 44. He will very likely be here in fifteen or twenty years when they bury me. As he is the grave-digger, it may well be Shea who buries me.

 “So, who is the person you tell the most stories about?” I ask.

 “Catherine Debogart,” Shea says.  “I can show you her grave. She died in 1821, she was 18, and her husband was a lot older. She was visiting friends outside town, he was a jealous guy, and he cut a switch off a tree, like they did then, to beat her. She was pregnant and he beat her so bad she bled to death. And she said, when she was dying, ‘I want you to bury me with this stick’—”

 “Why did she want to be buried with the stick?” I ask as we walk up a hill toward the old section. “I would think she’d want to get rid of it.”

 “So it would turn into a tree and everybody would know what he did,” Shea says. “And it did. There’s always a tree at her grave. Even after the family cut it down, in the 30s, another one grew. This guy had three wives after her and they all died kinda young.”

“The prick,” I say.

 “Exactly,” Shea says, as we pass through the graves.