What Graveyards Are
1418 Words
Karl Frank Oct 31, 2021
When asked if I would deliver a homily today, in a service where we would commemorate the dead, I knew I had some ideas about those things, more particularly about graveyards. I had recently read Robert Menasse’s The Capital, and had marked the passage I read earlier. So I figured I could do this, and here it is.
Not everyone here knows me, and among those who do, fewer still will know about my connection with cemeteries. It started In the 1970s,when I was in my thirties, I was in a period of relative poverty, during which I worked part-time at lots of things, full-time at none. One of those things was mowing the grass at a local cemetery.
It was a time when I needed help, and among the friends who helped me was Sally Waite’s first husband, Richard Corum. He told me the cemetery at the Universalist church in town needed someone to cut the grass, and he told me who to call. I got the job.
One day, while I was mowing along with my son Max, someone from the church came out to talk with me. There was going to be a burial next week, and as the church considered me their groundskeeper, I was expected to open the grave. (That’s professional talk for digging the hole.) They would pay $50
In rural Vermont in the 1970s, the idea of hiring a backhoe to do a burial was a flat-lander absurdity. From the ensuing experience I can report that the depth was five feet, not 6 as you will often hear, and that the Universalist cemetery kept a rusty bed-frame in the toolshed to serve as a template for cutting the turf to the right size.
36 years after my work for the Universalist graveyard in Vermont, involvement with The Mount Pleasant Cemetery took my relationship with cemeteries to a deeper level. I was retired, and not in need of work when this part of my life began with the death of my wife, Joan.
Before I carry on, let me explain that, because Sally Waite and I are happily married, I might have identified Joan as my first wife, but I don’t. In my ears, that phrase seems like I’m saying that Joan and I divorced. We didn’t. Quite the contrary, she died 5 months after our 50th wedding anniversary
Joan did not die unexpectedly, but nonetheless suddenly. She woke up on a Monday morning experiencing a brain hemorrhage, As she was wheeled away in a gurney at Addison-Gilbert Hospital, her last words were “Don’t be afraid”. On my way back home from the hospital, I ran into a friend. He noticed my stricken appearance, and asked how I was.
I just took Joan to the hospital, and she’s never coming back.” That’s what I answered and I knew it would be so. Joan died two days later without recovering consciousness.
I knewJoan was all for cremation over regular burial, so my first job was to arrange for cremation, and inform the hospital where to send Joan’s body.
Two days after Joan’s death, son Max came to visit and said “Dad, I’m here to help you move Mom’s things out of the bedroom. It will not be good for you to be going to bed every night and getting up every day with her empty bed next to yours, and her clothes in the dresser next to yours.
Max proved to be a good advisor.
Together we carried out her bed, her dresser, her clothes on hangers from her closet. The lingering signs of her personal presence in our bedroom had been instruments of depression. With them gone. I felt myself thinking about what I could do to incorporate her passing into a life without her.
This is where a cemetery comes back into the story, but in a way, my experience with memory and grief is already part of the cemetery story.
The house which was Joan’s and mine, and where Sally Waite and I now live, is 200 paces from a cemetery, the almost 200 year old Mount Pleasant Cemetery. I walk through it most every day. I am one of those people who count things and love numbers. So I am not making up the bit about 200 paces.
On the far side of this cemetery, across Mount Pleasant Avenue, is a builiding in which I rent a workspace, used as a shop and studio. That is why I walk through this cemetery most every day.
After clearing Joan’s personal things from the bedroom and I was again walking through the cemetery, almost daily. That was when the idea struck me that I wanted to have a gravestone there. Just as David de Vriend says in the reading, I wanted a stone with Joan’s name on it, one that would be of a kind she would have approved. I saw that she did not need to be buried there for a gravestone to do its job for me.
A stone would relocate my thoughts of her to a ceremonial place, the cemetery, where it was appropriate and healthy, from my bedroom, where it had been in the form of her clothing. A headstone would be a thing I had made, after her death, to memorialize her in a spot and in a way that was part of our general culture.
So I bought a cemetery plot, and started a search for just the right gravestone, one that I could in my mind explain to her – as to why I thought she would have liked it, and which was purpose made as durable object – Granite and Bronze! – to be a ceremonial object connected with my memories of her, but not a thing she had herself ever seen, owned, or touched.
I found one man still quarrying Cape Ann granite, the dark gray coarse granite that is not in vogue in the Memorial Stone industry. This man, himself seeming locally sourced like his work-product, working alone back of Lanesville, cut me a piece just the right size.
On it I put a bronze casting with her name and her words “Don’t be afraid.”
By means of this stone, and with the help of the cemetery itself as a gathering place of other such memorials, from — put in names her – her death was domesticated, rendered benign. The cemetery gave her a ceremonial home in a place fenced off from everyday life, most importantly, not in my house, and not a thing she had lived with and left behind.
It gave her young grandchildren a place to leave messages for her. When they went there, I had the feeling that she was teaching them about life, with her silent reminder that even good beloved grandmothers will die.
Later I happened to read Robert Menasse’s novel, The Capital, where I found David de Vriend’s soliloquy on graves, gravestones, and memory, and understood it immediately. It is an ideal reading for what I have have to say here.
Gravestones enable us to pay a friendly visit to people who died.
Almost the end, but there is a short Coda.
A year later, I got a call from the president of the neighborhood association from which I had bought Joan’s grave lot. He asked if I would be willing to serve on their board of trustees. The cemetery as lawn, trees, and gravetones, was revealed as depending on the a 501(c) non-profit corporation, a thing that would go out of existence unless interested volunteers could be found with the skills and time to keep it going.
The Mount Pleasant Cemetery Association, Inc. had an endowment, always shrinking – because invested in local bank accounts, at a tiny fraction of one percent. On course for bankruptcy. I decided to do what I could to turn this around.
So I became the Treasurer and manager of a Cemetery Association. I sometimes open graves, but only for cremation urns, work which can be done with a spade. For a full burial, I call in a backhoe, for which the cemetery is charged $400. We can now afford it.
The recent fashion, throwing the ashes of our beloved dead to the winds or seas, once seemed a romantic gesture. Now I wonder, is it not a way to make lives disappear without a trace? In any case, that’s not my choice. I ally myself with granite and bronze,
