Grave Realities

Of all the stories in Trespassers, people approach me most often about “the one in the cemetery.”  I don’t mind.  I’m a cemetery fan.  Call it bizarre, but when you grow up in a small town, the local graveyard is more or less your art museum.  You may see obelisks in your history books, marking the final resting places of “great” men, and relate them instantly to the ones that stand in the center plot in your local graveyard.  You realize that both people ended up under the same size and shape of sculpture in the end, and you realize that terms like “important,” “famous,” ”relevant,” even “good” vary by geography. 

To me, as I moved with my father from chuch to church, the unique gravestones of any destination suggested a sense of permanence — they were there when I arrived; they were there when I left.  They were the closest thing to lasting forever that I could see on earth.  I didn’t think there was anything scary about them.  In fact, they were a great comfort.   

I was particularly touched and comforted to receive a recent email from Mary, a long-time resident of the town called “Damascus” in Trespassers.  She knew my mother’s family, and she had an update to offer on the lore of the cemetery: 

You mentioned the engine on top of the tombstone in [Damascus].  Well, ……it’s gone now.  Stolen.  Nobody seems to know who took it, but it’s been gone several years.  It was a point of interest to everyone who saw it.  I always heard that the man buried there was an Engineer on the railroad, and it was his wish to have it placed there.

Did you ever notice the tree trunk tombstone on the entrance road into the cemetery?  I had  heard that a man had carved it himself for his own burial, but I met an older lady who told me she loved walking in the cemetery (I live on the street that goes into the cemetery), that she always stopped to look at that particular marker, because her grandfather had told her this story:

 

The man who made that stone tree lived in Casey County.  He fashioned it in that way because when his wife died in childbirth, the baby died, as well. He was devastated, so the limbs on the tree are broken off, which symbolizes their cut off lives. I think there was one exception, maybe, which was supposed to be him alone.  The grandfather told the lady that he could remember seeing the old gentlemen bringing the stone down Main Street on a wagon pulled by horses in the snow. 

I’m so thankful that Mary shared that memory; that image in itself could became a whole other book! 

After I received the email, I was motivated to go visit a famous local cemetery here in Richmond, VA.  If you’ve browed my website, you know I’ve been to Hollywood Cemetery before.  It’s an extraordinary old place, smack-dab in the city of Richmond.  (You’d never guess that, at the time of its consruction, it was designed to be a rural cemetery.)  It exemplifies just how well cemeteries function at once as archival libraries and ancestral touchstones, as well as repositories of lore, legend, and even plain old lies.  Hollywood Cemetery contains a mausoleum allegedly inhabited by a vampire, chased by an angry mob from the ruins of the Church Hill tunnel collapse.  (Seriously, that legend has become so popular that the family of the crypt’s original inhabitants had them exhumed and moved to an undisclosed location within the cemetery.) 

There are many, many examples of the exquisite tree-type tombstones Mary mentioned, but none of them are from the past century.  It makes you wonder at what sad point in time we decided that “they don’t make them like they used to” could extend to our eternal monuments.  Did it get too expensive, was it too time-consuming, or have these arts simply been lost?  I don’t know which answer is the best one. 

Reminds me of a particular legend my college professor, Gregory Nagy, shared with us during a lecture on Greek civilization, about how well ancient people were able to grasp and appreciate the concept of eternity.  From behind the elegantly carved rostrum, he gave what some would probably consider an example so pedestrian that it didn’t merit Harvard tuition money–the grave of Marilyn Monroe.  When Marilyn died, her then-ex-husband Joe DiMaggio placed a standing order with a local florist.  A half-dozen roses were to be delivered to her grave, weekly.  When the florist asked how long this arrangement was to last, he replied “Forever.”

Twenty years later, DiMaggio cancelled his order.

And I wonder when they stopped making people like the man who carved the tree Mary remembers in Damascus cemetery.  Something tells me they had a better grasp of what it meant to spend eternity in love. 

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