This isn't one of the historic cemeteries I've made a hobby of exploring over the past few decades…read more(and let me re-emphasize that I journey through those historic cemeteries and "explore" them with respect and regard for the dignity of those interred there and those they left behind who mourn them). I grew up in nearby Wayne, and traversed Franklin Lake Road many times over the years with my parents (there's a lake near the border with Oakland that we used to ice skate on in the winter), but never was aware of this cemetery until people I knew passed on and were buried here. In other words, you're not just going to stumble on this place while driving along-- you're going to have to search it out.
I first came here in the early 90s when my oldest friend's mother passed away. Off an innocuous side street, you drive past the modernistic office building at the entrance and the cemetery opens up in a vast expanse of green before you, up to the limits of the horizon where there is a forest surrounding the property. There are not a lot of trees in the cemetery itself and those that exist are interspersed with some tastefully rendered statues. I'm not sure how old the cemetery is, or how many acres it contains, but I would have to guess it's a fairly recent creation, and it seems quite large (an impression the lack of trees seems to enhance). The stones are all flat, and...as far as I can tell...there's little ornamentation to them; no enameled portraits to remember the departed by. It's simple but tastefully beautiful, particularly if you come here in the early morning during spring or summer.
My 2nd time here was some years later, when my friend's father passed away, and I wept like a baby (in part because I had known him since I was 7 or 8 and he once referred to me as his "3rd son,"; also, my mother was ill with the terminal cancer that would ultimately kill her, I was navigating my way through the days and nights in a state of numbed shock, and I guess this was an occasion to release that intensifying internal pressure--- at the risk of sounding like a dimestore psychiatrist, I think I was crying as much for my mother as I was for my friend's father, and maybe for myself as well because I had reached that stage of life where the people I had grown up with and loved were getting sick and dying).
The other person I know that is buried here is my friend's grandmother. She was a character-- irascible, unpredictable and unforgiving, dogmatically judgmental, harshly insulting if she didn't like you, and she didn't like a lot of people. I grew up listening to her "real life" ghost stories (every house she occupied in Paterson or Wayne was haunted). She had supposedly had encounters with serial killer Joe Kallinger and homicidal Mafia Don Albert Anastasia in which she emerged triumphant. She had had a hard life. It turned out I was the only friend of my friend's that she liked, and I used to visit her up until the time she died (towards the end, she was no longer safe by herself and was of necessity in a nursing care facility, and in one of my last conversations with her, she said, "Eddie, get me the hell out of here. We can just keep driving and rob banks for a living.").
For reasons I've forgotten, I wasn't around to attend her funeral a few years ago, but the personnel in the office were very helpful in pointing out to me where she was buried.
So far as I know, there are no "famous" people buried here, but the people I knew that are will be in my heart forever.
Christ the King is a sedate, beautifully constructed and designed cemetery that conveys awesome appreciation for life's great majesty and death's profound mystery-- it's a spiritual tonic for the faithful who come with the expectation that their loved ones are in a better place, and an opportunity for respectful reverence and spiritual reflection even for the likes of jaded 'ol agnostics like myself.
It's the perfect setting to mourn and remember those we loved, and still love, even though they're gone.
