Sweet Auburn: The Magazine of the Friends of Mount Auburn Inspiring All Who Visit | Page 20

People and Happenings

Volunteer Profile:
Rosemarie Smurzynski
By Jennifer Johnston,
Webmaster, Media & Imaging Coordinator

Volunteer Rosemarie Smurzynski has been visiting
Mount Auburn Cemetery for nearly three decades. She
vividly remembers some of the earliest Friends’walking
tours in the early 1990s led by Janet Heywood, former Vice
President of Interpretive Programs, and
by a very young David Barnett, then
Director of Horticulture and today the
Cemetery’s President.
She also recalls volunteering at
Mount Auburn’s booth at the New
England Flower Show some 25 years
ago, before the Cemetery even had an
official volunteer program.
It is the original vision of the
Cemetery—as a place of repose for
loved ones who have died and a place
of comfort for those who mourn—
that continues to resonate with
Rosemarie. If time-travel were an
option, she says, she would love to
attend the Cemetery’s Consecration
Ceremony, September 24, 1831, to
hear the moving address of Judge
Joseph Story, which outlined not just
an intellectual vision but also the great
importance of creating a landscape of exceptional beauty in
which future generations could find solace.
Her previous careers—briefly as a fifth- and sixth-grade
teacher and then as a Unitarian Universalist Minister—(she
graduated from Harvard Divinity School in 1980, and was
ordained in 1981) prepared her well for volunteer work at
the Cemetery, sharing the stories of Mount Auburn with
visitors of all ages and being present and compassionate
while teaching and listening.
Since becoming a volunteer docent in 2010, Rosemarie
has led numerous public programs at the Cemetery, was a
member of the Margaret Fuller Bicentennial Committee
celebrating the birth of Fuller in 1810, and led tours for
visiting Unitarian Universalists as well as students from local
high schools.
Her programs encompass a wide-range of themes: from
mothers, symbols, poets, to angels, monument symbolism,
public lots, and, most notably over the last four years of its
sesquicentennial, the Civil War.
Stories of courage, honor, and sacrifice uncovered during
her preparation for tours on the Abolitionists of Boston, the
Battle of the Wilderness, and the Battle of Fredericksburg
18 | Sweet Auburn

affected her deeply. Like characters
in Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of
Courage, one of her favorite books
growing up, she believes that Union
soldiers “still inspire us to this day to
live and to live for what we believe.”
For Rosemarie as for many others,
the monuments of Mount Auburn tell
stories of once-vibrant lives. Some of
our residents were legendary public figures, while others may only have been
missed by a few family members. She
cites, for example, the epitaph of “M.
W. B,” in the St James Public Lot which
illustrates her story:“She lived unknown,
and few would know, / when Mary
ceased to be,/ But she is in her grave—
/And oh! the difference to me.” Says
Rosemarie, “Mount Auburn is an important place to
realize the value of one’s own life as someone in the future
may stand in the exact place where you are standing today
and that might even be in front of your future grave.”
In travels with Tom (photo above, center), her husband
of over 50 years, they often visit cemeteries, reading the
international language of symbols on monuments in cities
from Warsaw to Rome, Florence, London, and Paris. Such
visits have enriched her understanding of the symbols used
at Mount Auburn, which can unlock the meaning of subtle
narrative threads running through the Cemetery.
In addition to leading tours and programs, Rosemarie has
a regular Friday shift at Mount Auburn’s Visitors Center
and she has spoken at the Cemetery’s 2014 Candle Lighting
Ceremony and the 2012 Service of Commemoration.
Rosemarie loves history. She is a member of the Boston
Athenaeum, Historic New England and The Massachusetts
Historical Society where she often attends events. She and
her husband Tom are parents of a son, Ken, married to
Susan, a daughter, Marlene, and the grandparents of two
girls. From time to time Rosemarie officiates at memorial
and graveside services to commemorate the dead.