Perpetual Care? Forget it. And “Rest in Peace” might as well be “rest in pieces.” Waterbury’s Grand Street Cemetery is just a ghost of a graveyard, at least if you define “ghost” as something invisible that nevertheless has a presence. Located in the heart of the city, the public Silas Bronson Library and adjacent Library Park with its walkways, benches and bandshell sit atop a cemetery unseen.
This subterranean secret remained unknown to me for years even though I’d been to the library for poetry readings and had walked through the park on occasion. But driving along Meadow Street one day on my way to the railroad station, I saw embedded in a brick wall a series of rectangular masonry tablets that looked like gravestones. I stopped the car and got out. From the sidewalk, I could see they were indeed headstones from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. There were about two-dozen of them, most in weather-darkened marble, others in brownstone. A few were carved with soul effigies, those winged faces of the puritan past. Even with the sun behind me, they were faded and hard to read.