Sweet Auburn: The Magazine of the Friends of Mount Auburn A Healing and Meditative Landscape | Page 21

Angels in flight in stone
Move after life-
An eternal dance beyond time
Bringing borrowed wisdom.
Excerpt from “A Trade”
by Nancy Rappaport
eye—often an angel or sculpture of a child— read the
inscriptions, and discuss the symbolism and the stories.
Increasingly, these monuments would move Nancy
to write. She began taking notes and asking questions.
I showed Nancy my favorite places as well as other
destinations to seek out on her own: Alice Fountain,
the Dorothea Dix monument, the Magoun monument.
What Nancy discovered was a sense of solace from the
extraordinary integration of funerary art and horticulture.
It was a different feeling than a hike in the woods, and this
difference surprised her.
Returning time and time again, Nancy began to
experience the transformative power of Mount Auburn.
She began to write about the landscape, the monuments,
and her experience in the Cemetery, often in poems or
verse. I soon learned that she was creating a narrative that
would become her first play, Regeneration.
The American journalist Ellen Goodman recently
described Mount Auburn as “an extraordinary example of life
co-existing with death.” In our walks together, Nancy sensed
the sacredness of the landscape, that it is a place of great
emotion, where, like Nancy, visitors come to courageously
work through the complex emotions of grief and loss.
Thankfully, Nancy has fully recovered and cancer is in
her past. She has given us the gift of her play, which she
calls a love letter to Mount Auburn Cemetery. Thank you,
Nancy. As someone who has devoted her life to helping
others, she recognizes that when we visit Mount Auburn,
we leave the better for it. In the words of Justice Joseph
Story, we leave the Cemetery feeling “purer, and better, and
wiser, from this communion with the dead.”
Dr. Nancy Rappaport is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at
Harvard Medical School and a child psychiatrist at the Cambridge
Health Alliance. For twenty-three years, she has worked with
at the health center of the Cambridge Public Schools where she
specializes in developing concrete strategies for struggling students
and offers professional development for teachers.
In 2009, Dr. Rappaport published In Her Wake: A Child
Psychiatrist Explores the Mystery of Her Mother’s Suicide
(Basic Books), for which she was awarded the Julia Ward Howe
Book Award from the Boston Authors Club. Dr. Rappaport is
also co-author of The Behavior Code (Harvard Education
Press, 2012), a book for teachers offering concrete strategies to
work with children displaying oppositional, anxious, sexualized,
or withdrawn behavior.
Meg Winslow (r) with Nancy Rappaport (l)
standing next to the statue of Hygeia, Goddess
of Health and Hygiene, commissioned by Dr.
Harriot Kezia Hunt (1805–1875) for her lot
(2630 Poplar Avenue) at Mount Auburn, and
carved by Edmonia Lewis (1844–1907).
2018 Volume 1 | 19