Dead Men Talking: Confessions of a Graveyard Tourist
I say to you who are passing by,As you are now, so once was I.And as I am now, so you shall be.Fear not death and follow me.~ an epitaph
I'll confess something. I enjoy cemeteries. In my own region and whenever I travel, I seek out the dead. I am a graveyard tourist.
No, I am not an adjunct member of the Addams Family. I am not a ghost hunter, nor some kind of weirdo necrophiliac. I seek out the dead because they have things to tell us. But most of us aren't listening. I am a writer. Writers need to keep their ears open to all, including those who are heartbeat challenged.
My fascination with cemeteries began when I was a boy. Our mother would take us to the cemetery where our kinsmen are buried to lay flowers at their graves and say a prayer, or two. Grandparents who passed before I was born. An aunt, aged 3, who died from a pot of boiling water spilling on her from my grandma's stove. A long lost great-grandfather whom no one had ever talked about, not even the old-timers, whose neglected grave I'd found on my own. Who was this guy? Why didn't anyone ever even mention his name? Was he a hanged horse thief? A pedophile? A murderer? He died in 1926. Nobody knows.
While my mother tended to the graves, I wandered around the cemetery, getting to know the residents -- old folks from the old countries, soldiers fallen in war, kids and babies-way too many. Over the years, I expanded my scope, exploring abandoned graveyards being taken over by nature, well tended small town cemeteries, isolated family plots and headstones on rural farms, laid before the advent of zoning; sprawling urban necropolises with huge family tombs and urn crypts; military cemeteries - including those of our erstwhile enemies; European cemeteries, where they empty the graves after thirty years to make room for the newly deceased; Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist and Native American burial grounds. I've seen them all.
I am partial to Protestant burial places because of their laissez-faire policies on epitaphs. One can be as verbose as one wants in death, as opposed to Roman Catholics, who place a gag rule on the dead. While I find many of the ethnic cemeteries beautiful and serene, I usually don't know their languages. Hence, having no Hebrew, Welsh or Polish, I find myself unable to listen to many of the folks buried in those places. There is, in fact, a Welsh church and graveyard near where I live. What I can make out from all the consonants on the headstones is that most seemed to have hailed from south as opposed to north Wales. Native American burial grounds feature animals on many of the headstones. The further east one goes in North America, the older the graves. New England churchyards constitute a motherlode of historical insights. Most of the Confederate military cemeteries I've visited in the southern United States are lovingly cared for and rich with historical information. The saddest graves I've seen in that region are the many anonymous graves of unidentified soldiers and slaves. Imagine toiling as someone's property your entire life and then being denied even the small dignity of identity in death.
But our ancestors' tales endure past the decades and centuries. All one needs to do is to read their epitaphs and their birth and death dates. How fortunate we are to live in an age of cutting edge medicine and safe work conditions. Those who passed away in earlier centuries have different tales to tell. Like the Wolf family members buried at Lenox Rural Cemetery in Canastota, NY. "Polly Wolf, wife of Daniel," departed this earth June 6, 1823 at age 56. Her daughter, also named Polly, 21, predeceased her mother by three weeks; and Daniel's and Polly's son, Henry, died the following year, at the age of 32. Was this family wiped out by some plague? Diptheria? Influenza? Smallpox? A lot of folks at this cemetery passed in 1823 and 1824. Daniel, Sr. is nowhere to be found. Did he remarry and end up being buried next to a new wife? Nobody knows.
In the same vein, among the most tragic passings I've encountered in my meanderings among the dead, are those of the Keating family of Cazenovia, NY. Something very terrible happened in 1881 in that small upstate New York village. The bloodlines of the deceased at the Catholic cemetery overwhelmingly stem from the Emerald Isle. In the space of eighteen days in April-May, 1881, Maurice and Mary Bagley Keating, formerly of County Tipperary, lost four teenaged sons: John, 19; James, 18; Andrew, 17; Maurice, Jr., 14. Again, was it an epidemic? A house fire? A farm or industrial accident? Nobody knows (though perhaps the town historian might have a clue). The parents went on to live into old age. One-hundred-thirty-three years have faded or eliminated historical memory, and the unspeakable grief this family suffered is now beyond living memory. But I mourn for them today. Such cluster-deaths were not unusual pre-20th century. The cemeteries speak volumes to what life, and death, were like before antibiotics and work safety rules.
But the deaths that tug most at my heart are those of children. Older cemeteries are heavily populated with the corpses of small children and babies, my late aunt being one. The epitaphs tear your heart up. And reading scores of them does nothing to inure one's emotions. A typical such grave is that of Mary F. Beecher, at Lenox Rural Cemetery, who died at age 7 on August 7, 1831. Her fading epitaph reads:
This lovely bud, so young and fair,
Called hence by early doom.
Just came to show how sweet a flower,
In paradise would bloom.
Then there are those who, defying pestilences, rudimentary science, senseless accidents and the whole range of mortality confronting people in the pre-industrial age, somehow managed to beat the odds and live well past the stunted actuarial tables of their time. A few paces from 7-year old Mary F. Beecher, lies Hannah Barnard, widow of Ses Barnard, "Soldier of the Revolution who fought at Bunker Hill," who passed on June 10, 1848 at 102 years, 5 months, 15 days. "Time hath no power to wear away thine image from our hearts," reads her epitaph. Ses, as with Daniel Wolf, is nowhere to be seen. Was he KIA and buried at Bunker Hill? Too much time has passed. Nobody knows.
One sees in cemeteries how names have evolved over time. The Ezekials, Jebediahs, Fannys and Daisys of yore give way to non-Old Testament given names, eventually yielding up the Liams, Justins, Ashleys and Megans of our time.
Cause of death is rarely revealed on headstones. Moreover, mention of cancer was curiously taboo even unto recent times. And reference to a person's private parts was just not done. But I came across one very gutsy lady at the New Woodstock, NY cemetery:
Mrs. Polly Virgil
Wife of Mr. Benjamin Virgil
died April 24th 1825
in the 48th Year of her Age
Diseases come and go at His bidding;
And that which did me arrest;
It was a Cansor in my Brest.
Amen, even so come Lord Jesus.
Her stone, topped by the oft-used grief symbol, the weeping willow, is in surprisingly good shape, the etching sharp and very readable, unusual for stones that old.
I draw from these tales of the dead in helping me establish place, persons and history in my writing. We should all pay heed for we all shall follow in their steps. As we individually face our own mortality, we would be wise to ponder what our own last words will be. Not necessarily our deathbed utterings, but the words we would like to pass onto future generations from the sarcophagal pulpits of our own gravestones.