Public Loss

Despite the cold, I took a meandering path home from the gym today, partially to get a picture of a relatively-new mural at the corner of Columbus and Coles, and partially just out of a desire for some fresh air.  Because I took that path, I ended up stumbling through other peoples' loss.

The first was at the corner of Montgomery and Brunswick, the site of St. Bridget's Church.  Everything around it is low-slung - the housing complexes, the public high school, the athletic field - so the dark brick bell tower is visible for blocks.  It's a beautiful building, all dark brick and white stone, with those tall, bullet-shaped Gothic windows.  Historic, too: it officially opened its doors in 1887, the same year that Georgia O'Keefe was born and the character of Sherlock Holmes first appeared in print.

As I approached from the west, I could see people clustered at the front steps, talking, hugging, heading for their cars.  I passed a woman carrying a bouquet of roses in a paper wrap, and saw more parishioners cradling bouquets as I got closer.  As I hooked a left down Brunswick, I ran into a student and his parents, who told me what parishioners have known since last November: St. Bridget's was closing.  Today was the last mass.

When I moved here, St. Bridget's was part of Resurrection Parish, a conglomerate of five Downtown Jersey City parishes formed in 1997, banding together against atrophying parishioner numbers and income.  Like most big cities, the inciting incident was demographic change, as the ethnic Irish, Italians, and Germans who had once dominated the neighborhoods north of Montgomery Street fled to the suburbs and were replaced, largely, by African-Americans and Puerto Ricans (and, later, various Asian groups).  According to The New York Times, St. Bridget's had a congregation of 650 in 1997, down from 6,000 in 1910 when the Irish ran downtown.  A more direct illustration: my own church, St. Michael's (one of the five downtown parishes mentioned above), is an enormous building in a (now-)thriving neighborhood, but tonight there were exactly 15 people there, including the priest, altar boy, and cantor.*

*Granted, it was also a 6:30 p.m. Sunday mass.

Since then, two of the churches in Resurrection Parish have closed (St. Boniface has been sold, but remains an imposing vacant on 1st Street, and St. Peter's is now Prep's cafeteria).  And early last year, the archdiocese dissolved Resurrection Parish as a corporate entity, returning its three remaining churches to their original status as independent parishes.

My student's mother told me that the final mass had been very nice, but deeply sad.  The church had been a big part of their lives, as it had for many people in the neighborhood.  Although parishioners were encouraged to go to St. Mary's (another former Resurrection church), she said that she'd heard a number of people weren't sure if they would even go to church anymore once St. Bridget's closed.

I thought that was interesting, the way a community can become synonymous with its purpose.  You might seek out a community because you're drawn to its goals or philosophy, but (in my experience) it's the relationships that make you stay, and that make your experience meaningful.  I went on a lot of retreats in college, and they were all well-designed and included some really powerful activities and prayer service.  But what I remember are the people with whom I shared those experiences.  So when those people are gone -- when you no longer have that same community -- it can be tough to want to carry on by yourself.

After wishing my student and his parents a good weekend, I continued down Brunswick.  Another pair of parishioners were up ahead, paused at the fence that looked into the narrow courtyard of a long, squat housing development immediately behind the church.  In that courtyard was a snow-clogged shrine: a dark orange plastic milk crate holding wilted flowers and empty liquor bottles, surmounted by a framed photo of a young, short-haired Latina.  Printed at the bottom: R.I.P. Pretty.

And further down Monmouth Street, another memorial: this one created on the big rectangles of plywood covering the windows of a vacant storefront.  From across the street it appeared to be covered with black capillaries, but a closer look revealed dozens of messages written in black Sharpie:

R.I.P. Eric
R.I.P. E $
One love
The Good Die Young!
NEVER 4GOTTEN

You see shrines like this in the deeper parts of cities.  Sometimes there are stuffed animals, or t-shirts bearing the face of the deceased, or votive candles.  In more violent neighborhoods, you often see them erected for murder victims, although natural deaths are memorialized in a similar manner (for instance, only one of the two people whose monuments I saw today died under what can be described as suspicious circumstances*).  Eventually the physical tributes degrade or are removed by weather or garbage men, leaving only the R.I.P. graffitos and the occasional commemorative mural.

* Based on my own supplemental research, which -- due to the resources available and my own very-limited desire to intrude on someone else's grief -- is extremely surface-level.

Part of the communal experience of living in a city is that you share your life with your neighbors, whether you want to or not.  On the street, at festivals, at bars and restaurants and shops, your lives intersect.  Even if you throw your hood up, plug in your earbuds, and crank up Serial, public spaces make it impossible to totally isolate yourself.  Often that means exposing yourself to others' art or passions or big life events (ever had to wade through someone else's bachelor party to get a drink?).  But it also means sharing the darker parts of life.  It means being exposed to each other's grief and loss.

This is unusual, because we normally only know about grief if we have some personal stake in it.  Otherwise, people tend to keep it private.  In the shared spaces of a city, however, it's uniquely possible to become aware of strangers' most personal losses -- even if that awareness goes no further than simply knowing that it exists.  That a person, or a community, has been lost, and there are people left behind who mourn.

I wasn't a parishioner at St. Bridget's.  I didn't know Pretty, or Eric.  But even that brief exposure reminds me that other people exist as more than just obstacles on the sidewalk.  People are mourning and rejoicing and living stories that I'll never know.  That's reason enough, I think, to be mindful, and to be kind.