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Amid the dead, a tribute to life

TOTOWA

Here, among the gravestones, Laurie Giardino has learned about life. As a child, she played hide and seek behind the monuments. In her teens, she escaped in their shadows, dreaming about rides to San Francisco on Route 80 and sharing clandestine kisses with boys.

By 26, she was placing flowers on the graves of classmates who had died too soon.

And at 35, she found herself burying her father, then her sister, within the space of three months.

She is now 44 and still takes monthly visits to Laurel Grove Cemetery, the muse for a Web site and photographic memoir, "The Totowa Book of the Dead."

It is the result of years of grief, joy, and love, she says, proving that one's art doesn't just imitate life.

"As the years passed, I realized how much death and photography had inundated my life. ... I never expected to see the day that my pictures would outlive the people in them," Giardino writes in the first chapter of her memoirs. "I never expected that the people I loved would be the ones to all fade away."

Totowa has a population of almost 10,000, according to the latest census figures. Meanwhile, Laurel Grove, one of five cemeteries in the borough, has more than 85,000 people interred in its grounds.

"It's been years since some of the people I knew have died," said Giardino, who now lives in Queens and works in upstate New York as a middle school computer and journalism teacher. "I've had time to distance myself from it, and I felt like I could finally share what I've learned, with objectivity and humor."

Freckle-faced, with brown eyes like her father's, Giardino watched the rain glisten on her father's grave on a recent morning in Laurel Grove. In this section of the cemetery, the memorials are gray and white concrete slabs, some decorated with images of angels and Jesus.

Sal Giardino's gravestone is 4 feet of black marble in the shape of an oversized light bulb, designed by his daughter. Written across the bulb in 24-karat gold: "The World's Greatest Electrician. Lic. #409."

"It's still one of the most talked about memorials in Passaic County ever," said Anthony Sgobba, a monument designer in Paterson who worked on the gravestone for nine months, carving and sanding the stone. He keeps a framed picture of it on his desk at his business.

"The most often asked question is, 'Does it light?'" Sgobba said.

Sal Giardino died on Independence Day 1994, at age 58. As an electrician, years of working behind walls, with their lethal asbestos layers, had unknowingly destroyed his health.

"He was a funny guy. The best," Giardino said.

In one scrapbook, a collage of Thanksgiving Day photographs features her father carving the turkey in his Halloween costume. At his last Thanksgiving, he was dressed in a gorilla suit.

"He was always interested in photography," Giardino continued. "I picked it up from him."

In 1966, Sal and Marie Giardino built a home in Totowa, leaving their roots in the Riverside section of Paterson to raise their son and two daughters among other working-class Italian families.

Marie Giardino still lives in the same split-level ranch house.

Outside of school and home, Laurie Giardino's time was spent with friends at coffee shops, bank parking lots, and at Laurel Grove Cemetery.

"We're the ones who grew up in the working-class suburbs and assimilated to mainstream, white ethnic status," Giardino writes in her memoirs. "My girlfriends still clung to fantasies of a happy marriage. The guys wanted to take over their father's businesses and dreamed of becoming rock-and-roll stars."

But some of them didn't live long enough, dying from cancer, suicides, car crashes, and drug overdoses.

Three months after her father passed away in 1994, Giardino's younger sister, Kim, at 28, was killed in a motorcycle accident in Morris County.

"I started looking for photos of her after she died," Giardino remembered. "There were 20 years of pictures to go through, but as I was watching her grow up in my photographs, I noticed an uncanny coincidence. There were many other people I had pictures of who had also died untimely deaths. I started to write their stories, but I haven't written about my sister yet. I think it's time, though."

In tribute to her sister, "a free spirit," Giardino had Sgobba create a 4-foot marble gravestone capped off with an engraving of the Western Hemisphere and a peace symbol overlapping it.

"Peace" and "love" are etched in gold lettering at the bottom of the marker. In between the words is a picture of Kim, forever smiling.

Giardino's father's and sister's gravestones are even featured in "Weird N.J.: The Book," released in September by Barnes & Noble Books. The book is a compilation of the popular underground magazine about local haunts and legends.

"I'm proud that my father's monument has reached a tourist attraction status in New Jersey," Giardino said in earnest.

She had taken her first photography class as a junior at Passaic Valley High School and majored in art at Hunter College. Later, as a stringer for the Herald News, she would take her old Pentax 1000 to sites in Paterson and Totowa in between assignments, capturing friends hanging out on Union Boulevard or neighborhood children riding their Schwinns.

She started her Web site in 2000, as a way to share the photographs with friends across the country. Then she began to receive e-mails from people she didn't know, but who had recognized the people and the Totowa landmarks.

"The nostalgia kick gets to us all at one time or another, and [her] site brought back a few years - good ones, I might add," said Michael Diceglie, 57, a former Totowa resident who came across the Web site while doing a job search.

Rick DeDonato, 48, who now lives in Delaware, says he stumbled across Giardino's site while he was planning Passaic Valley High School's Class of 1973 reunion.

"The site was amazing in bringing back memories," he said. "I marched in the Memorial Day parade as a scout. I basically lived at Cozy's Sweet Shop and ate more hot dogs with 'all-the-way' sauce at Pappy's Diner than I can remember."

Giardino likes that strangers have reminisced through her pictures.

She is including more than 300 of her black-and-white photographs in "The Totowa Book of the Dead," still unfinished. The work has been funded, in part, by two grants: the first from the Time Warner Council for Basic Education and the other from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

Despite her experiences with losing loved ones, Giardino said the final chapter would end in hope.

"My sister Kim was an organ donor," Giardino said. "Her death provided new life for a number of people. The man who received her heart still corresponds with my mother. Death brings rebirth. It's the cycle of life."

Giardino plans to be buried in Laurel Grove, near her father and sister. Her gravestone, she said, will resemble a camera.