The other day when we were walking by the graveyard near the house you asked me if I thought, we would ever die. And if life and love both fade so predictably, we’ve made ourselves a kind of predictable lie. So I pictured us like corpses lying side by side in pieces in some dark and lonely plot under a bough. We looked so silly there all decomposed, half turned to dust in tattered clothes, though we probably look just as silly now.
The Airborne Toxic Event. 2011. “The Graveyard Near The House” Mikel Jollett, 2011. on All At Once.
The name of the cemetery comes from the estate of Stephen Jerome, who was vicar of St. Kevin’s Parish in Harold’s cross in 1639. Mount Jerome was opened in 1836 and was originally intended to be in Dublin’s Pheonix Park. The first burial took place on 19th September 1836 of the infant twins of Matthew Pollock. While it initially was a non-denominational cemetery it later became the main protestant cemetery in Dublin mainly because of the sizable Protestant population in the Harold’s cross area.
Because it opened during the Victorian period, the monuments are an expression of the success of the middle classes from that period. Because of this the cemetery has one of the finest collections of Victorian memorials, tombs, vaults and crypts in Ireland.
