Unknown stories
I took a meandering drive the other day and ended up in an isolated, community cemetery.
Many of the graves were old, but there was a newer contingent, somehow more sad because they were more recently connected with grief and loss.
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I relished the quiet of the cemetery near the foothills, and the view of a snowcapped mountain further away. I stole memories with my camera, without knowing the person or love or duty that the gravestones represented.
At the same time, it reminded me of our mortality. The cemetery where my mother and grandparents are buried is sterile. It looks more like a manicured park than a cemetery, because the markers are all flat.
I love the texture of an old marker, the words, the changing sensibilities.
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I think about loss and how it effects us all eventually.
I often think of my mother. Her loss forever changed my life. I viewed these markers through a lens tinted in my own thoughts and sadness.
A coworker died this week, unexpectedly of a heart attack. It was doubly jarring because some of us had hung out with him at the bar just a few nights before.
Work is a slightly different place right now, a little more solemn as we walk past his desk, smell the flowers left there in his memory.
Don was a player. A cool cat who knew everybody. Who scammed a piece of birthday cake for another coworker from a total stranger. Who jumped into all the pictures taken that night. And now he’s gone.
It’s a different kind of loss. The loss of someone you’re not close to, but he still leaves a hole. I went to the bar last night, and thought about how we’d never see Don there, macking on anybody else.
Life is short. And in the end, all you get is a gravemarker.
I’ve made it clear before that I don’t want to be buried. I find it pretty creepy. I want to be cremated; what is done with those remains afterward, I don’t care. Bury them. Scatter me in Michigan and California. Mark me down as beloved daughter with a sense of humor. Mark me down as a lover of beauty. And hope at the end of it, I made a difference. That I was loved, that my friends, family, coworkers cared about me. And maybe that will be enough.
For more cemetery photos, it’s flickr time.
Nice post, Mel. And nice pictures; the stark black and white shades work well. I like the … elegiac? … tone. I’m getting morose now. I don’t know if that was your intent, but here I am 33 and feeling way to close to death all of a sudden. Between you and Matt, I’m not sure what I am going to do.
I have always had a great (some might say morbid)fascination with old cemeteries. I like walking through them, looking at the names and imagining what their lives might have been like. I actually had to do that once for an exercise in a theater performance class.
I’m not sure I want to be buried either. I know I won’t know the difference, but I know I don’t want to be alone in the dark.
Sorry to hear about your co-worker. I know the feelings you describe all too well.
Your posting is poetic and matches the photos incredibly. Very somber and reflective and now, that’s how I feel too. Lovely artwork through the lens. You’re getting good at this.
I am fascinated with cemetaries, as well.
When we moved to the Midwest after many years in California, we were struck, almost instantly, by the display of the dead here. I don’t remember cemetaries in California. I know they are there, but they didn’t seem to be prominently situated.
In the Midwest, small towns all over have cemetaries on each side of town so that they are they first thing you see driving in, and the last thing you see leaving town. I later discoveded that on one side of town was the Catholic cemetary and on the other side of town was where the Protestants were buried.
Isn’t it strange that we are bent on carrying our prejudices past the grave and into the life beyond?
It’s hard for this entry not to come off morose. Thanks for the comments.
I was morose at times writing it, or in the cemetery. But it was also a lovely, warm day, so warm that I became a little sweaty, was not wearing a jacket.
But it does make me think of mortality, as I often do.
There are a great number of old cemeteries in the midwest, Cave Dweller. I wish I’d spent more time going through more. I think it might be my new hobby.
Perhaps why there are so many more in the Midwest, at least perceived, is that people have lived there longer. Or that there have been greater populations there longer? California is a weird state in that old for most places is a century.
But because I think cemeteries might be a new photographic obsession for me, I looked up how many there were just in Fresno County. 35. Some of them larger, and some of them probably more like family plots. That seems like a lot. But then again… I just looked at a site listing cemeteries in my home county of Berrien, Michigan, and there seems to be 100 or 101. So I guess that’s a big difference. 35 just did seem like a lot until now.
As for carrying over our own prejudices, I think it speaks more to our survivors than the dead. The dead don’t care where they lie.
I wonder if geocaching and your new thing for graves could be conbined in some way….Well, I guess that could be a bit creepy, or unhygienic, anyway. bad idea.
If I had a GPS thingie… but I don’t. I’ve got so many weird obsessions anyway. But geocaching at cemeteries doesn’t have to be unhygienic (even if it’s still creepy.) People often leave bizarre mementos. It’d be no different to do something for geocaching. I just wouldn’t bury it.
This is a lovely post, Mel. I, too, have been fascinated with cemetaries, particularly cemetaries from generations past. Older cemetaries seem to exhibit more personality. . . the markers are more personalized to the individual and WHO he or she was in life. Nowadays, it seems that cemetaries are pre-fabricated, much like everything else around us, and neglect the individual completely.
This is a really pretty entry. And, as usual, great photos.
Speaking on keeping people separated, my relatives are buried in cemeteries where they weren’t allowed tall grave markers, not until recent generations, and where they were buried away from whites. Got to keep everyone separated, perhaps especially beyond the grave.
My mother’s and father’s parents and other relatives have plain headstones flush with the ground, headstones of the poor, the kind easily overgrown and easily forgotten. I have an aunt and an uncle who died as an infant who have no headstones at all. And my mom routinely cleans a grave that has her own dates carved in, just waiting for the end dates to be added to complete the cycle. That one, btw, is a tall headstone because nowadays people realize all money is green, no matter which hands it came from.
Perhaps all we can expect is a grave marker. At least it’s more durable than our own fragile stuff we all pretend is far more permanent than it is.
That’s interesting. I didn’t really think about segregation in that way or the way markers are displayed…
I went to a second cemetery after this post. It was much larger, and seemed to have areas divided. The most interesting area, aside from the obligatory excess of the richer Catholics, was the area where I found many Hmong graves.
Some graves had the epitaphs written in English and others did not. One headstone was very elaborate, with the portraits of the wife and husband etched in the front. In the back was a picture of a small courthouse and the words U.S. citizen. That touched me in a way I didn’t expect. The people there were so proud of that status.
Wow. To be proud of being a citizen of this deeply flawed place, when their lives surely had to have been hard, both here and where they’re from. That is something.
The etchings are a more modern thing, i understand with computer technology and whatnot. Were they more recently deceased?
Yes, this was a very recent marker. Within the last couple of years. You’re right about the technology.
And the husband was also listed as having worked for the CIA from the 60s to 70s.
That’s why the Hmong are persecuted in their own country, why they ended up in America.
A bit late in getting around to it, but I really enjoyed this thread and the pictures, here and on Flickr (I had no choice but to laugh at the Oscar Myer tombstone).
I also like walking in old cemeteries, though it’s not something I do often. As to the segregation even in death thing, I seem to recall Evelyn Waugh’s book The Loved One (and the even better darkly comic, incredibly irreverent, film of the same name) having some reference to Jews not being allowed to be buried in the same cemeteries in Christians. Or maybe I’m thinking of something else…
The segregation comments remind me of a passage in Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/ La Frontera . She talks about when her family’s land in Texas (as well as that of other Chicano farmers) was bought by companies that put a fence with a padlock around the community’s burial site. Passage into the cemetery was (and likely still is) treated as trespassing.
I guess looking at graves can be another way of studying society. I never thought of it that way. Thanks, everyone, for bringing that to my attention.