Graveyard Field Trips: A Memoir

Unholy Obsession

When I travel, I like to visit cemeteries. It fascinates me to see how different societies memorialize their dead. I try to understand how history interacts with the present outside the funerary gates. Is the cemetery part of the community, or it is shunned, neglected, forgotten: out of touch with modern needs and uses? How we treat the dead says a lot about how we understand our own lives and how we expect to be treated after our deaths.

This anthropological project of mine began early in life. At age four, I got lost inside Arlington National Cemetery, just outside Washington, D.C. While my parents paid their respects at Kennedy's eternal flame, I wandered off. The Arlington necropolis is huge: 612 acres of headstones in military formation commemorating the dead of every American conflict since the Civil War. Even though I was too young to realize my mother had any name other than Mom, I don't remember being frightened. A nice lady fed me peppermints from her purse by the tour bus parking lot until my parents came. I learned early on that graveyards bring out the best in most people. Maybe the recognition of our own mortality gives us an urge to do good while we can.

All these years later, I don't find cemeteries a bit morbid. The sun on my skin, the peaceful landscaping, the solitude: all repair the damage done to my psyche by the culture shock of traveling. Some cemeteries, particularly 19th century ones, pass for public sculpture gardens. My favorite outdoor artwork resides at Cimitiére de Père-Lachaise in Paris. A larger than life Prometheus is shackled to a boulder. Although the vulture thrusts its cruel beak into the Titan's side, Prometheus still has the strength to raise his fist against the gods. I know nothing at all about the life celebrated by the stone, but the courage implied by its monument, railing against fate, speaks to me across the gulf of time.

Another of my favorite pieces of funereal art also happens to be in Paris, at the Montparnasse cemetery. A huge four-poster bed marks the grave of M. Pigeon. An elderly woman lies beneath the covers, fully dressed in Victorian finery. A bearded gentleman is sitting up beside her, a book clutched in one hand. Without context, it looks as if the sculpture should be titled, "The Return of the Husband." Whatever the original intention of the piece, it's memorable.

My favorite graveyard, in all its glorious decay, is London's Highgate Cemetery. All but abandoned after World War II, Highgate was overrun in the early 1970s by self-proclaimed vampire hunters. These men broke open crypts and staked several corpses. In reaction to the desecration, the Friends of Highgate formed to take over the management and upkeep of the cemetery. They walk a fine line between maintaining the romantic disarray and preventing the monuments from falling completely to ruin. When I discovered in in January 1991, the beauty of its angels inspired my lifelong love of cemetery statuary.

The most poignant cemetery I've visited so far was at the Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico. Acoma may be the site of the oldest continuously occupied settlement in North America. Since 1640, families have buried their dead in the churchyard of the Spanish mission. The pueblo and mission stand atop a rocky mesa so, for the last 365 years, people have transported dirt up to cover the graves. Originally, they carried it in baskets on their backs. Now they use pickup trucks. The level of the ground has risen many times over the pueblo's history, as son buried father atop grandfather. The burial tradition continues today as families who have moved away from the Pueblo return to be buried with their ancestors.

Still, sometimes I can't help but wonder at cemetery decor. Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills has a replica of Boston's Old North Church, a towering marble monument to George Washington, an Italian glass mosaic depicting events in the life of Abraham Lincoln, and a Pre‑Columbian sculpture garden. When I visited, an actor was scheduled to portray the risen Christ on Easter. Moctezuma would speak to schoolchildren on Cinco de Mayo. I'd never considered a cemetery as a theater before.

When I visited that first time in April 1994, the Southern California sun blazed down. The cemetery's lawn was a lush chemical green, agonized between the bright sun and the encircling desert hillside. I wondered how much water a graveyard could drink in a day. The living were rationing water for showers, but the cemetery stayed green. In an instant, I grasped the importance of appearances in LA.

As we drove around the sprawling memorial park, we passed families setting out lawn chairs and picnic blankets around the graves of their loved ones. Small children played tag. The bronze plaques, set flush into the ground, served as natural "free" zones.

Handfuls of incense burned over graves. Smoke floated lazily on the warm air. Plates of oranges lay on the grave markers. It was my first experience of the Chinese festival called Tomb-Sweeping Day. Although we hadn't driven far from the "Old North Church," I felt as if I'd entered another world.

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It isn't so much that I seek out cemeteries everywhere I go. Really! It's more like every time I turn around, there's another tomb. While strolling through a park in a Tokyo suburb, we passed a granite monument. Someone had placed yellow chrysanthemums in the polished stone vase. "Why are there graves in the park?" I asked.

Null, our host, answered, "When I was a child, this land was a wilderness. The graves were here then. When the city made this park, they could not move the graves."

Talk about memento mori: there among the tree‑shaded jogging paths -- not far from the cherry blossoms and children's laughter -- were immovable monuments to the dead. In any American city, the inconvenient dead would simply have been uprooted, as was the entire necropolis in San Francisco. I understood something about Japanese respect for ancestors that would not have become clear to me any other way.

It reminded me of how the lawn mower ruined the colonial cemeteries of Boston. With complete disregard for the people buried below, headstones were aligned for ease of mowing. The unlabeled bodies are lost below. You can visit Paul Revere's headstone, but not where his skeleton lies. I find the idea horrifying, but so very American.

I can never see enough cemeteries. There is always some new detail I haven't appreciated, some view I haven't enjoyed. As I travel, burial grounds continue to capture my attention. I find myself drawn by the catacombs of Palermo, by the pyramids in Egypt, by the Dia de los Muertos celebrations in Oaxaca, by the acres of dead in St. Louis and in Atlanta, and the silver mine ghost towns of Nevada. Nearly everyone I ask about graveyards in their area can suggest cemeteries I should see.

In February 1995, I returned to Arlington National Cemetery. 225,000 bodies lie there, the strongest anti‑war statement I have ever witnessed. The magnitude of devastation awed me. Every future announcement of war should be made while standing in the cemetery grounds.

The monument that touched me most deeply was the bronze plaque dedicated to the Challenger astronauts. Their bodies, of course, were never recovered. Portraits of the five men and two women smile around a seven‑pointed star that reminded me uncomfortably of a stylized explosion. The astronauts gave their lives to science. That seemed more worthy, to me, than to die for land or oil or honor.

Once more I stood before Kennedy's eternal flame. I had only been a month old when his death overwhelmed my country. Decades later, people still crowded around the grave. Some of them were crying. Of course, Jackie joined Jack in 1994, but what did that really mean?

I felt more alienated than ever in my homeland. In graveyards around the world, I have been able to draw conclusions about how societies interact with their dead. Here in my own country, in the place where my quest for knowledge began, I was still completely mystified. Why were these dead important? Why is their gravesite a place for pilgrimage? Why do strangers still mourn them?

Many people took snapshots of the shiny granite markers. I photographed the crowd and decided to keep searching for answers.

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This essay was originally published in the book Death's Garden: Relationships with Cemeteries, published by Automatism Press in 1995.