John and Rachel Duffy had a hard time of it in the final months of John’s life. Mostly, as it always had, it came down to just the two of them. They had owned a small business together, in Newton, Massachusetts, with no employees. Neither had a family that they’d been close to, and they had not had children.
No regrets, Rachel says.
“It was a wonderful life. We traveled. We did everything we wanted to do.” For 42 years, she says, “We were each other’s everything.”
When John became ill, in 2023, at the age of 75, the intensity of their focus and dependence upon each other ratcheted up. To this day, Rachel remains uncertain of what afflicted her husband. The symptoms, she thinks, indicated a neural disorder. He did not want to get medical care, believing, or hoping, he would get past it. He became bedridden, and Rachel cared for him around the clock. Toward the end, he entered a phase of memories, insights, and reflections. Rachel made notes of his introspective monologues.
Then, late one night in December, his eyes rolled back while she was tending to him, and he died.
Her grief was compounded by the fact that they had not made plans for — had hardly even discussed — their afterlife care. She didn’t want a funeral because they’d never had a close circle of mutual friends. The obvious choices were the conventional ones, and neither appealed: cremation, or (for $40,000) a plot at Mt. Auburn Cemetery in Boston.
There are some things you don’t think are important until they are. Her revelation came when she let her next-door neighbors know that John had passed.
“They’re Chinese,” she says, “and they barely speak English. About two hours after I told them I got a knock on the door, and it was the wife, and she just gave me a huge hug. There was no speaking at all; she just hugged me. And then she gave me an envelope with two $100 bills in it. I knew that she gave me that to honor my lost one.
“And that’s when I started on the path of, I need to honor him.”
For inspiration she thought back to their shared experiences. One seemed sort of silly, but it was pertinent. They had watched the TV series “Six Feet Under,” and after one episode, in which one of the characters had chosen to have a “green burial,” they talked about it.
Also, something else popped into her head: Vermont.
“John loved nature. He loved the trees and everything about nature. We used to come to Vermont just to drive around. It was so peaceful. We couldn’t move here because of our business, but we loved coming up here.
Putting these inspirations together, she did some research and ended up on the phone with Michelle Acciavatti of Vermont Forest Cemetery in Roxbury.
“Michelle just, like, held my hand,” she says. “It was over the phone, but it was incredibly helpful to me. I was thrilled. ‘Oh my god, I’m being guided by something.’”
John died on Jan. 28, 2024. It was now the first week of February, the depths of winter. (The cemetery had been open for less than a year.) Not all of the forest cemetery was accessible, and besides, Rachel was three hours away in Newton. So she left it up to Michelle and her crew to pick a spot for John’s burial. A funeral home in Boston agreed to transport him to Vermont, and friends drove Rachel up for the Feb. 7 service. Rachel did not participate in the labor, but she had gone to the funeral home and washed John’s body, which Michelle had suggested, and a practice she believes in passionately, as a loving and healing ritual.
“It was incredible,” she says, standing at John’s grave during a recent visit. “It was important to have that connection, and to know that way that he was really and truly gone.”
They buried John in a cashmere blanket that he had used constantly when he was ill, and Rachel brought a sheepskin to cover him with. He had loved the feel of it, she says; its softness had comforted him in his waning days.
But an even more dramatic connection occurred.
“John never had a dream in his life,” says Rachel. “He used to complain about it. ‘I want to have dreams!’
“So one morning I went into his room, and he was weeping. He said, ‘I had the first dream of my entire life! I was a shepherd in the Green Mountains!’ He was ecstatic, and we talked about how he would take care of the sheep. He was just in love with the idea of being a shepherd in the Green Mountains.”
She mentioned the story on the phone to Michelle as they were making final plans for John’s arrival. His burial site had been selected and the ceremony would take place soon.
There are a few areas at the Forest Cemetery that have taken on names. There’s Spruce Grove, near the cemetery’s entrance on Beaver Meadow Road. Just to the west there’s Wayfarers’ Glade. There’s the Upper March and the Lower March, and farther down the hill there’s Ancestors’ Grove.
Where John Duffy is buried, an old stone wall can be seen nearby. It traces a path through the sloping terrain, visible through the trees as it descends toward the river below. It’s a remnant from an earlier time, when this wasn’t a forest but pastureland for a working hillside farm and wool was central to Vermont’s agrarian culture. These subtle but distinguishing features have earned this section of the cemetery its own name.
It’s called The Sheepfold.
