Alex Green

It’s quiet out. The afternoon sky is draped in a blanket of gray clouds and a slight breeze is weaving its way through the trees. Above, yellow leaves fall like shooting stars. Dried branches snap and crackle as his blue sneakers follow the dirt path deeper into the woods.

Ahead, past trees saturated by autumn, is a clearing with hundreds of small, gray slabs of concrete. They sink into the earth as if pulled down by invisible hands. As Alex Green enters the clearing, he looks at the carvings on a slab and bends down to brush away a pile of leaves, revealing an etching: C131.

He stands and allows his eyes to roam across the uneven stumbling stones that serve as crass grave markers for the hundreds of people who died in two nearby institutions for the intellectually and developmentally disabled.

Green has spent the past five years researching the lives of the 298 souls buried here in the MetFern Cemetery, learning their histories and fates. The only things written on their “graves” are C or P (for Catholic or Protestant) and a number that denotes the order in which they were buried. With a hunch to his broad shoulders, he exits the clearing and continues down the wooded path.

Green has always felt a sense of discomfort around cemeteries. The 37-year-old was born in Salt Lake City, Utah, and moved as a toddler to California. His father Jon was a veterans’ doctor who moved the family to the Bay Area during the height of the AIDS crisis. “My father’s work set the tone for how I deal with death. We moved into a really cataclysmic landscape that was decimating a very vulnerable community and it was very scary,” he said in his office at Harvard University, where he works as a fellow teaching op-ed writing.

Photo courtesy of Alex Green, shot by Shawn Read.

His understanding of loss was further heightened by the death of family and friends, such as the passing of a classmate in the second grade due to a car accident. At 13, Green remembers reading Daniel Defoe’s “A Journal of a Plague Year” – an 18th century fictionalized account of watching the plague spread through London – and asking his mother Jan, “why is this so familiar?” He laughs when he recounts the memory but is unable to hide a slight pinching at his eyes. Defoe’s journal spoke to Green then and still whispers to him today as, once again, he is surrounded by death.

Green has dedicated himself to researching the histories of the Metropolitan State Hospital and the Walter E. Fernald Developmental Centre, two institutions in Waltham for people with physical and intellectual disabilities. Between 1947 and 1979, they buried most of those who died within their walls in unnamed graves on a plot of land now called the MetFern Cemetery.

His work at MetFern, which started when he headed the Waltham Historical Commission between 2010 to 2014, led him to become a part-time history teacher at Gann Academy, a high school tucked between the cemetery and the Fernald School. He teaches 11th graders about the history of their town’s institutions, working with them to construct the biographies of those buried at MetFern using census data and town records.

“It is exceptionally difficult work,” Green said. “Working with a group of 11th graders is the best group of people I could have imagined doing that with because they’re able to make incredible leaps of imagination and understanding and empathy.”

Yoni Kadden, Green’s co-teacher and close friend, believes his passion and ability to put people at ease has translated well into teaching. “He might be the most beloved teacher in the entire school. Students will literally sit at the doorstep of his office waiting for him to come back and talk to him.”

Green often goes out to visit MetFern alone to think about what he and his students can do next to preserve the cemetery and bring recognition and justice to those buried there. Although he has a lot of help from his students, Green carries the majority of the burden on his shoulders. He initiated the efforts to uncover MetFern’s history and spent abundant time working on the biographies before it got too emotionally taxing.

Alex Green touring Fernald with his Gann Academy students. Photo courtesy of Alex Green.

“Alex is a really smart guy and keeps his back straight, but he’s also very emotive. Given the things he’s working on and that he talks about, he’s frequently on the verge of tears when he’s talking,” said Adam Rosenblatt, a professor at Duke University who has been working closely with Green to write a book about people who care for places of the marginalized dead. “For someone as brilliant and cerebral as he is, I’ve never met someone who also wears their emotions on their sleeve and is as vulnerable as he is.”

Despite the emotional and mental toll this work takes, there is a fierceness and a desperate need for justice that propels Green forward. He is forceful when he speaks of the institutions’ inhumane treatment of its patients.

“Disability and disabled people are an essential part of our story as Americans, of our history and their rights are a central part of how we evaluate whether our democracy is actually doing what it should,” he said. “These two things are linked, and yet we’re missing half of this conversation because so little of this disability history is known and legitimized.”

Patients ranged from infants to adults. While some had serious conditions such as cerebral palsy and hydrocephalus, others were admitted on the basis of having a low IQ. Nonetheless, many of the patients, regardless of their age and affliction, were neglected and abused during their time within the institutions’ walls, Green says. Some were even the subjects of radioactive medical experimentation during the late 1940s and early 1950s. Although conditions began to improve in the 1980s as a result of a disability rights movement, not everyone at Fernald and MetState reaped the benefits.

Those buried at MetFern represented some of society’s most vulnerable, people who were denied proper care and attention both in life and in death. This is why Green knows his work is so important – he’s giving people a voice in death when they never had one in life.

“I do feel some personal pull on this, I see myself in some of this history, people I know...I see a stigma that exists that keeps folks with disabilities out of what we say is ‘our history’,” he said.

Chester Allen, whose African American father fought during the Civil War, is one of those people. According to Green’s research, when Allen was between the ages of 11 and 21, he was sent to a farm outpost of the Fernald School, where he began his life as a permanent institution inmate. In 1951, at the age of 63, he passed away due to chronic kidney inflammation and heart problems. His grave is marked as P-25.

“I do have a personal connection to this, and I see a stigma that exists that keeps folks with disabilities out of what we say is our history. I don’t want to be forgotten because of that,” Green said with a small slip of a smile, almost wistful in its curve. It seems like he actually knows the people he’s speaking about and is fond of them. At least he feels for them, mostly, he’ll say, because he’s grown up around friends and family members with disabilities and has himself wrestled with mental health issues, which once led to a week-long institutionalization.

Green grew up in Walnut Creek, California, an intolerant town with anti-Semitic tendencies. In high school, he called out a teacher for a racist exam question and was punished for it with low grades. He was stigmatized as a “trouble making Jew” and as a result had swastikas carved into his car and burned into his lawn with pesticides. Despite the emotional strain, these experiences taught Green what it means to step up and fight against injustice, even if it is lonely and isolating. It’s a fundamental lesson he’s taken to heart and applied in his efforts to bring justice to those buried at MetFern and more awareness to an under-looked part of American history.

“Alex is in this really lonely uphill battle to make disability history public [but] I think he’s an incredible person to be in that role and I admire him tremendously,” says Rosenblatt.

Green’s path to disability history and MetFern started when he opened a bookstore called Back Pages Books in Waltham six months after graduating from Brandeis University in 2004.

“It was one of those things that sort of impressed the hell out of all of us because we were all trying to figure out what to do [after school] and he just went and did it,” says Robert Jackel, who operates a law firm in Philadelphia and was a college friend of Green’s. “It was very clear when you talked to him that he was someone who read a lot. He was always referring to poetry.”

Through operating his bookstore, which he owned for 10 years, Green heard rumors about the town’s institutions and what was committed in them. At the time, Fernald was still operational (it closed in 2014) and was then the oldest state-funded institution in the United States. He remembers feeling an overwhelming sense of quiet when he first visited the cemetery in 2014 with the knowledge of who was buried there.

“I was confronted by an incredible sense of beauty and peace, but also injustice and unsettlement,” he says with a frown as he walks around the cemetery. His tall frame takes the time to acknowledge each grave. “I’m carrying around in my head right now 298 stories of exceptional people, people whose lives are essential to my understanding of what this country is, who we are, and what our history is, and whose stories are filled with and end with incredible sorrow and pain. That’s hard.”

Alex and his student testifying at the Massachusetts State House in October 2019 to advocate passage of a bill to open up the medical records of instituionalized patients. Photo courtesy of Alex Green.

Currently, Green is working on creating new markers for the cemetery and on resetting the 298 sunken and toppled headstones in order to make the space more dignified. He’s also focusing on advocating for better access to patient records and is mentoring students who have continued to work on biographies outside of class. Green hopes to synthesize all he’s learned on MetFern, Fernald and MetState into a book so that it may be useful to the general public. He’s still trying to work through and process. Some days are better than others.

“I don’t know how [I] cope with it, you live with it...there are people who seek resolution, and I am not one of these people,” said Green, pausing for a moment to contemplate. “I think I seek understanding, but there’s grief in this work and that grief, if you try too hard to resolve, can make a false reality.”

Green makes his way up a narrow, uphill path away from the cemetery where columns of hazy sunlight trickle down from the canopy of leaves. The woods thin out to give breath to a wide-open field stretching out in each direction like a velvet green carpet. He stands a small figure against the backdrop of nature and of history, a man haunted by the enormity of his past and of the lives of the 298 others who lie in wait behind him.

He’s connected to all of them, tethered by a relationship born of compassion and a deeply ethical sense of justice. He doesn’t feel at peace, not yet. But he’d like to, and maybe one day he will.