We were asking for the location of the green burial grounds at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. Her answer seemed like a perfect beginning for the adventure of discovering what might be our final resting place.

It felt like the perfect day for such an experience, as it was a grey, cloudy Sunday afternoon, with just a bit of soft rain… and then there was a Kafkaesque turn of events. In fact, the guide was incorrect, and we wandered among the headstones and mausoleums of many famous people buried on the extensive property – Washington Irving, Elizabeth Arden, Walter Chrysler, William Rockefeller, and others. While it was an interesting afternoon, it was not what I had hoped or planned for… I wondered how this could be so difficult.

Determined to visit the green burial ground, I made time two days later to explore on my own. With a fixed timeframe in mind, I dipped into the office (open only during the week) to ask my contact to make an “X” on the map. The cemetery, like most, is labyrinthian. And, while I had a map in hand and there were some markers along the roadways, happily, I remembered her saying that there was a stone path leading to this area of the cemetery… 

The green burial ground, as you can see, is a small field with wildflowers and milkweed, surrounded by trees with the Pocantico River burbling in the background.

I fell in love with it. It felt like home to me. I hadn’t expected that.

  As I looked more closely at the field, I noticed not only a few end-of-season flowers but the milkweed. That was the moment it all got very real for me. Tears came to my eyes, and my throat tightened. I traveled back in time to remember walking with my friend Nancy and my German Shepherd, Penny, in the wild fields at the end of the road where we grew up. We walked from the time we were seven or eight years old. While that was my first memory, I thought of my dad next because the milkweed was so gorgeous — something we both loved. It had grown at the edge of our yard. I immediately thought of how my dad would have loved this place…the man who turned the acre my parents lived on into a fabulous, if rather an idiosyncratic, garden with beds of stunning flowers — dahlias, tulips of all kinds, narcissus, and more. It made me happy to make this connection with him across space and time. I held him in my heart and thought of how at peace I felt, having made the decision that this would be my final resting place.

I wish everyone such peace of mind in making all of their end-of-life decisions.