Graveyard Field Trips: A Memoir

Young Souls and Old Stones

"I am going to die," the epitaph said.

Despite the heat baking the insides of my lungs, I halted before the little marble gravestone. I don't know why it had seemed like a good idea to visit artist M. Parfitt in August. A Sacramento transplant, she wore blue jeans and a plaid short-sleeved top. I felt practically indecent in my hand-me-down sundress. It had to be 110 degrees. Still, I shivered as I framed the little headstone in my camera's lens.

"Our Dear Cora's Last Request: I am going to die. Do not bury me in the cold ground."

Had they ignored her dying wish? Did she curl beneath my feet in the dry Sacramento dirt? Could she feel the heat of the sunlight crushing me? Down deep inside her grave, was she basking in warmth?

Had seven-year-old Cora Elvareto Dingley belonged to one of the Christian sects who believed that the dead remained imprisoned in their graves until Judgment Day, straining to hear Gabriel's horn? Had she been begging for the reassurance that she'd meet her mother again in Heaven? Had she longed to go to "the Spiritland," as one of her permanent neighbors did? On her monument, no graven angel led Cora upward. No hand of God reached down to her.

The child's words blazed from the knee-high gravestone like an accusation. Her parents couldn't fend off death. They couldn't keep her safe or protect her when it mattered. They couldn't keep her with them, but had to bury her in the cold earth. They couldn't even have cremated her, since the first crematory in America wasn't built until 1876, the year following Cora's death.

It wasn't the Dingleys' parental failures that froze my heart that August day. It was that her parents chose her last wish to adorn her tombstone, so that every time they stood before it, every time they touched the marble or brought her flowers, every time they thought of their little girl, they would know how they had disappointed her, sending her alone into the ground. Everyone who passed the grave would know how terribly, how thoroughly, they'd failed her.

Children's graves are common in the Sacramento's Old City Cemetery. Lambs and stone rosebuds with broken stems, doves and little angels guard them. As the California state capitol, Sacramento had been blessed with master stonecarvers. Some of the most glorious stone bouquets I've ever seen ornament the Old City Cemetery's monuments.

Sacramento, approximately seventy miles northeast of San Francisco, became the first Californian boomtown in 1849. As such, it grew immensely wealthy. The former frontier outpost benefited as the last provisioning point for forty-niners on their way up to the Sierra gold fields. Between 1848 and 1853, over half a million people passed through Sacramento on the way to seek their fortunes.

A city ordinance in December 1849 founded Sacramento City Cemetery to be a "public grave yard" unaffiliated with any religious organization. It wasn't the first public graveyard in the area; New Helvetia Cemetery (now a park) and another early cemetery (now a junior high) preceded it. But the Old City Cemetery remains as the oldest original (non-rebuilt) historical site in Sacramento.

The cemetery is an incredibly beautiful place. Beneath the arching branches of oaks and the fronds of palms, white marble markers rose against the flawless blue Californian sky. Ornamentation varied from faux Egyptian to upright Protestant obelisks, from hands clutching each other throughout eternity to angels and muses standing upright against their grief. A noble stone soldier guarded the Grand Army of the Republic. Enormous antique rosebushes sparkled with vivid blossoms. Squirrels chased over the gravestones, followed by low-slinking cats. The only people I've ever encountered amidst the acres of monuments are groundskeepers and volunteer members of the Old City Cemetery Committee.

My friend M. Parfitt had worked for the Committee during their sold-out Halloween night fundraising tours. She'd portrayed May Woolsey, a twelve-year-old girl who died of encephalitis four years after Cora Dingley's death. May's gravestone had a complicated Gothic shape. A scroll presents her name. Carved into the back of the stone, where a casual viewer would never see it, May's epitaph read:

"Saw the rose at early dawn

A fragrant budding gem.

Saw again at noon, and lo!

'Twas dead upon the stem."

After May's death, her bereft mother asked a spiritualist to contact the girl. May seems to have written a letter from beyond the grave -- "Mama dear, do not weep for me" -- which had been found a hundred years after May's death, walled up with her toys and clothing in her childhood home. The Sacramento Discovery Museum displays the letter and May's other possessions. She's a cemetery celebrity. Her grave serves as one of the highlights of the cemetery committee's Halloween tour.

The Old City Cemetery Committee erected historical markers before several of the plots. Senators, governors, and a Supreme Court Justice share the ground with 2,000 pioneers from around the globe. Among the historic dead rests Mark Hopkins, one of the men responsible for the transcontinental railroad. His monument cost $80,000 in 1879. John Sutter Jr. was the son of the man on whose property gold had been discovered in 1848. The Tilden Family descended from settlers who came over on the Mayflower. Alexander Hamilton's son had been buried three times in three places before finally coming to rest in the Sacramento City Cemetery. Five hundred Sacramentans buried in a mass grave during the cholera epidemic of 1850 testify to the hardships of pioneer life.

Other than the groundskeepers, M. Parfitt and I were the only people in the graveyard on this sweltering August day. When we had filled our hearts and cameras with death and beauty, she and I went to the grounds of the California State Capitol, where we could rest on a shady bench and contemplate the mysteries of the dead.

"Young Souls and Old Stones" was originally published on the Stones CD (Lone Wolf Publications), February 2002.