decency & memory

smallpox_memorial_15apr2015Over the past couple of years, I’ve written before about the old smallpox cemetery out by Clapp Pond in the Provinceland’s National Seashore. Last weekend, a group of Provincetown people dedicated a memorial to the fourteen souls anonymously committed outside of town.

After Kurt died, the pestilence house and smallpox graves became a place to meditate on the existential dimensions of illness and isolation. I’m still sorting through my questions, and haven’t found a lot of solace, but the decency of the people who built this memorial makes the world a bit less lonely.

smallpox_plaque_15april2015

6 thoughts on “decency & memory

  1. This, their second burial, is the one to hold on to. The first burial is not erased, but this act asks us to gaze publicly into the complexity of their deaths. Through witness, some sort of reconciliation.

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