Last week I took a ride out to see the old (1854) St. Feehan's grounds. I knew that the church itself had been moved to the Genesee Country Museum site, but I was still expecting something to remain of the rest of the complex.
Well, I was wrong. There is only the cemetery and some remembrances from the new new church that burned a few years ago. And the cemetery is smaller than I remembered it in my probably near 60 years since memory. The cemetery is situated around a looped drive off Chestnut Ridge Rd and it is surrounded on two sides by homes and in the back by trees behind which are more homes. Indeed, it is a modest area poised in the middle of a developed housing area; not what I had expected.
Given all that, I decided to walk through the cemetery expecting to some more familiar names than I actually did. Along the main loop there is a large stone cross close next to which is the gravesite of Fr. Murphy and two other priests. There is a new area on the far side of the loop which has some room for the future. Although there were not as many familiar names as I expected, there were many I did recognize. Mostly the parents of kids we knew from those schooldays at St. Pius X. The thing that struck me the most was how many veterans of World War II were buried there. It was such a telling reminder of just how much that war impacted the lives of that generation. If you were not directly involved yourself, people you knew were. Fr. Murphy himself was a chaplain and no doubt his experiences shaped him and indirectly all he later pastored over. For those of us born after that war, there has never been such a grand scale calling to arms and so it is hard to fully appreciate what our parents lived through before bring us into the world.
It sure would have been nice to have talked more to them about their pre-us lives.
