Tag Archives: family graves

More Cemeteries to See Before You Die

Posted on July 6, 2023 | 2 comments

The past several months have been intense. My father fell in August last year and was too fragile for surgery, so he had to spend a couple of months healing in the hospital. When he was released, I was in the middle of sending out the Kickstarter copies of Death’s Garden Revisited. I spent most of November and December traveling back and forth to Michigan to care for him and my mom.

At the end of November, I was contacted by my publisher, who was interested in updating 199 Cemeteries to See Before You Die for a second edition. I had to tell her that I was excited to work on the project again, but I couldn’t commit to starting work on it until things with my dad settled down. Still, we signed the contract and I made a list of new cemeteries I wanted to write about.

I was on my way back to see my dad again at the end of February when I got the call that he’d passed. I helped my mom through his funeral and ordered my first gravestone before rushing back to San Francisco to get down to work on writing the new cemetery pieces.

As it turned out, I’d only just gotten the research done and was starting to write the new entries in April, when my mother had a stroke.

I flew back to Michigan once more to care for my mom, but I made myself take a break every day to write about another of the new cemeteries. To be honest, the work was a life raft. It felt good to have something I loved so much to look forward to each afternoon.

I returned to California in the middle of May, turned in the new cemeteries, and finally started fact-checking and updating the original 199 Cemeteries. I turned in 25 pages of notes last Thursday.

Now I’m waiting for the editor’s notes, if there are any, and the redesign of the book with the new cemeteries and photos added. I haven’t seen the new cover yet, but I know they’re working on it.

The book is planned for release in Autumn 2024. I cannot wait for you to see it. It’s going to be lovely.

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Posted in Good cemetery news

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Death’s Garden contributor: Chris LaMay-West

Posted on April 10, 2022 | 1 comment

Chris LaMay-West believes in the power of rock music, poetry, and cats. His work has appeared in numerous venues. A California native, Chris resides in Vermont, where he writes, works for a college, and lives with his wife, two cats, a dog, several chickens, and an unbelievable number of bunnies. You can learn more at https://chrislamaywest.com/.

Chris and I met many years ago at an open mic I hosted for Morbid Curiosity magazine. He wrote for the magazine several times, read at my events, and was really fun to get to know.

His story for Death’s Garden Revisited is about visiting Pension Mountain Cemetery in Berryville, Arkansas, where he has family buried and his grandfather served as caretaker.

What’s your favorite thing to do in a cemetery?

Look for the oldest headstones and struggle to make out the faded legends.

Tell me about your favorite cemetery.

There are some amazing cemeteries in Boston: dates going back to the 1600s and people who you previously thought only existed in textbooks.

Is there a cemetery or gravesite you’ve always wanted to visit?

Yeats and Kerouac are high on my list.

If you have any choice, what would your epitaph be?

He tried to leave it better than he found it.

Do you have a favorite song about cemeteries or graveyards?

“Long Black Veil” comes to mind. You will, of course, not go wrong with the Cash version, but I’d like to also suggest the cover by The Bastard Sons of Johnny Cash as well.

Loren again:

I had a lot of fun putting together a playlist of cemetery songs recommended by the Death’s Garden Revisited contributors. You can listen to it here.

I would also love it if you’d check out Death’s Garden Revisited, which is available for preorder on Kickstarter for a few more days. This beautiful book will be full of 40 amazing essays about why visiting cemeteries is important. Check it out — and please consider ordering a copy for yourself: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/lorenrhoads/deaths-garden-revisited-relationships-with-cemeteries

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Posted in Cemetery interview, Deaths Garden Revisited

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Welcome to CemeteryTravel.com

Posted on March 31, 2021 | Leave a comment

Six or seven years ago, I had a brainstorm to create a video that would introduce CemeteryTravel readers to the cemetery where I grew up, the one that taught me to love graveyards. I quickly realized that I couldn’t film it by myself. Unfortunately, my kid wasn’t interested in serving as my camera person.

Another brainstorm later, I decided to ask my friend, collaborator, and former director Brian Thomas if he would shoot the video for me. When we were in college, I had the honor of appearing in some of Brian’s student films and I knew he has a gift with a camera. I asked him to shoot me gardening in front of my grandparents’ headstone and touching the Youell tree stump. He came up with all the other moving shots in this video.

We shot the footage in 2014 and there the project languished. Every so often I would open iMovie and take a stab at assembling the bits, but my lack of editing skill made the work highly frustrating and very depressing. The gulf between what I wanted and what I could manage was crushing.

It took another brainstorm to finally get the job done. Earlier this year, I approached my friend John Palisano, who had published the first edition of Wish You Were Here and created an amazing book trailer for me. I asked John if he would edit the raw footage together for me.

After John said yes, his son Leo got interested in the project and put together this lovely video. Leo edited the footage together, added some of my photos where pieces were missing — and then animated them, and put up with my niggling comments of shortening this piece or that. He chose the stone-grain typeface for the title cards. He added the blue jays from Brian’s original videos as intro and outro sound. He made the the video of my dreams at last.

I was literally incapable of making this video without their help. Thank you so much, Brian, John, and Leo!

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Posted in Cemetery essay, Cemetery snapshots, Wish You Were Here

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Today my brother would have been 49

Posted on October 14, 2014 | 8 comments

Rhoads_Allen_3853The wind ruffles the leaves, making a gentle rustle that seems to echo my breath. It’s a sound so gentle it is no sound, or else it’s the sound of the sea, of the blood, of life in its inexhaustible rush from birth to grave. Ashes to ashes, leaf to earth to soil to feed the roots to swell the buds to form leaves again to capture the sun. Everything is a cycle, endlessly spinning: the earth in its orbit, the sun whirling through the galaxy, one continuous dance flowing farther and farther out from its heart and never ever finding rest.

My brother is buried here. The wind whispers through the variegated grass that has grown high in front of the stone, obscuring words I no longer need to see to feel them stabbing into my heart, a long thin prick like a knitting needle, jabbing again and again so deep that I don’t feel the path of the pain, only its terminus, the point from which it radiates out into my limbs like a heart attack, like a stoppage of breath when you choke on something that cannot be swallowed and cannot be coughed out, which much lodge inside until you die of it.

I do not want him to be dead. My daughter tells me, in a sweet plantive voice, that she wishes she knew him. She wishes he had not chosen to drink himself to death before she was implored from the oblivion that exists before birth to come and help me heal the pain in my heart.

I wish she had known him, too.

She sometimes refuses to come to this graveyard with me any more. Once she came here and gaily chased rabbits, streaks of silence through the dancing grass. Now she knows it makes me sad like nowhere else in the world. Here lies my brother, my grandmother, the only grandfather I ever knew, and the grandmother who helped raise me, alongside her husband, who was dead before my parents conceived me. And a cousin, killed in a car accident before her first birthday, though not before mine.

Many hopes lie buried here.

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Posted in Cemetery essay, Deaths Garden Revisited

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