Graveyard Tales (ePub)

There are over 1,600 people interred in our graveyard*: men, women, and children buried here from the nineteenth through twenty-first centuries. Some of these people achieved a level of local, national, or even international notoriety during their lifetimes; some are ancestors of families still active in our community. A few are memorialized by the names of local streets, schools, or neighborhoods.

Sadly, others are virtually anonymous, their gravestones broken and worn beyond recognition. Some plots serve as the resting place for a single person; others contain the remains of couples or even multiple family members.

Whether the interred is well remembered and frequently visited, vaguely recognized as a familiar name, or completely forgotten, each has a story. Each was a person with a life, a family, dreams, successes and failures. Long, full lives for some; tragically short lives for others. They all share one thing in common: a connection to Metuchen and to our church.

This book is a compilation of imagined soliloquies, each in the voice of a person buried in our cemetery[1]. Each soliloquy contains a degree of historical and biographical data, mixed in with imaginary narrative reflecting what the person might want to say to us.

*Customarily, the term graveyard referred specifically to a burial ground affiliated with a church (typically on church property), while a cemetery referred to a secular burial ground. In modern usage, however, the two terms have become interchangeable.