Grave Matters

Okay, this one is going to sound petty and disrespectful, almost blasphemous.

Why can't my mom be in a really cool cemetery?

I know how a cemetery ought to look. I've seen your blogged pictures of old cemeteries Back East, with their classic upright headstones surrounded by wrought iron fences. I've walked among the early 20th century graves in Fayetteville, NY, and much, much older ones on Nantucket. I've seen the high end statuary in that cemetery near Syracuse University, and the deer or moose shaped one at Evergreen Cemetery on Oracle Road in Tucson. I've been to Boot Hill in Tombstone. I've been to the Haunted Mansion. I've watched Buffy!

No vampire would be caught dead where my mom is buried. There are very few crypts to hang around in, and hardly any upright headstones. Grave markers--that's the funereally correct term--are set in the ground, flush with the surrounding dirt, so that lawn mowers can be rolled past (and probably over) them without the clang of mower blade on granite or brass. As best I can tell, all the Tucson cemeteries are like that, over most of their real estate - at least, every patch of cemetery that's still accepting new tenants at semi-reasonable prices. Driving by these places, pretty much all you see is a lot of short grass, a few trees lining noose-shaped drives, and a combination office and mortuary building in the middle.

I don't know whether this practical, don't-make-it-look-like-a-graveyard approach is a function of local custom, ground conditions, or the  economic realities of the times. I do know that growing up and traveling around, I always saw the kinds of grave markers that stood upright.

Down in Tombstone, Arizona, the markers in the old Boot Hill cemetery are definitely vertical, if not as formal as the ones in Fayetteville or Syracuse. They have a gallows humor to them that still draws tourists and sells postcards. Some of the more interesting ones are scattered around this journal entry. I think I read or was told that the markers there (at least the cross-shaped ones) are replicas of the originals, the 1880s wooden markers having long since rotted away. But they're still cool. You expect good tombstones in Tombstone, and you get them.

I'm not saying I want my mom's marker to tell of a death as colorful as the ones noted on Tombstone's tombstones. I'm glad she wasn't "Hanged by mistake," "found in an abandoned mine," dragged to her grave by a cowboy after death by smallpox, or "stabbed by Gold Dollar." I'm just saying a flat marker in the ground lacks the sense of history and romance the other forms have, even if I did design the flat one myself.

I'm not a particularly morbid person, but I've designed a fair number of grave markers in my life. When JFK was shot, I sat in a class room or lecture hall in the Hall of Languages at Syracuse University, drawing headstones. I had no clue about the Eternal Flame or Arlington Cemetery, or that a murdered president's grave wouldn't be surrounded by the graves of more ordinary folks. I just drew a lot of inverted U shapes, and put the JFK epitaph on the big on in the middle of the page.

A few years later, I wrote on a rock above the tiny grave of the only parakeet I ever had:

Here lies Friskyblue.
He was no pest.
He broke his leg,
So now he'll rest.

I had been diagnosed with an allergy to feathers shortly before Friskyblue's death. Within a year or so of that burial, I also laid to rest a wild baby bird we'd tried and failed to save. I think I marked up a rock over that bird, too.

Twenty years after that, in 1989, I buried Jenny, the first dog I ever had. Or rather, I paid a handyman to do it. I've already posted the poem I wrote on that awful occasion, but here's a piece of it:

There was no moon out as he dug her a hole,
Watched by the rabbits, gnatcatchers and me,
While hawks screamed, but only because they were free,
As he struck sparks from rocks with his long digging pole.

When he was finished, the moon rose at last.
He carried the tools out and then drove away,
While I struggled to mop up the smell of decay
From a dog still alive just a day and a half past.

Yes, Jenny got a painted rock, too. Her marker proclaimed her "The best dog in the world." I wasn't far wrong on that. She was certainly the best dog in my world.

My next dog, Noodle, is in the room with me now. Her ashes are in a plain white oblong box, taller than it is wide, labeled with a paper sticker the size of a business card. Last night I discovered that at some point the intermittently leaky ceiling over my built-in bookshelves caused the ink to run, so that the sticker now commemorates "Noo [smudge] [smudge]." The only thing about it that really says Noodle to me is the old dog collar slung around the base of the box.

On the whole, I think I'd have preferred a back yard grave and a painted rock.

Karen

Color photos by KFB. Black and white ones by JBlocher. Or maybe I took some of the black and white ones, too. It was a long time ago, but I think maybe I did take them.


Above: Billy Clanton, Frank and Tom McLaury, and some sightseers.


Karen outside Boot Hill at the edge of Tombstone, Arizona, not far from the OK Corral.