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Weekly Photo Challenge: Letters

Posted on April 29, 2014 | 3 comments
Broken headstone in the Alamo Cemetery, Danville, California

Broken headstone in the Alamo Cemetery, Danville, California

This headstone caught my eye on Saturday as I toured the Alamo Cemetery.

Last week was a rough one, as I dealt with the collapse of my cat Morpheus’s health.  At 17 months old, he’d developed crystals in his bladder — after suffering all his young life with an immune disease that had attacked his teeth in February.  I left the Mare Island Cemetery a week ago Saturday to take him in for emergency surgery.  By Friday morning, he’d relapsed.

In the midst of Friday morning’s rainstorm, I took Morpheus to the SPCA and asked them to take him back.  After a year and a half of emergency vet visits, tiny bags of expensive cat food, and more medicine than I take as a grown woman, I had to face that I could no longer care for him.  I’d lost hope in February that he would ever be well.  Last week, I finally grasped that I was no longer even able to make him comfortable.

Still, the SPCA counselor said that none of his health issues appeared to be life-threatening.  That was the breaking point for me:  if it had been a matter of caring for him through his final illness, I might have been able to stick it out.  This roller-coaster could go on for years.

I’m a travel writer. I have a full schedule of travel ahead of me this summer.  I couldn’t board Morpheus, because his fractured immune system couldn’t handle the vaccines he’d need.  When I went to DC earlier this month, I enlisted a family member to care for him, but after the bladder trouble, he would need closer monitoring.  I’d need to find him a live-in nurse.

I cried through the intake paperwork at the SPCA.  I cried through saying goodbye to him in the SPCA hospital.  I had to sign something saying that I understood that they might have to euthanize him, if he’s not adoptable.  I will never know, though.  My part of Morpheus’s story is over.

When my last cat died at the ripe old age of 17, I had him cremated.  I keep his ashes in a silver sugar bowl on my dresser.  I think I understand now how important it is to have a gravestone or a niche or a sugar bowl on which to focus your grief.  I have nothing of Morpheus left but his favorite toys — and the foolish hope that someone, somewhere, with medical skills and a large disposable income is looking for a project cat to love.

*

This was inspired by this week’s photo challenge: http://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_photo_challenge/letters/

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Abandoned

Posted on March 3, 2014 | 13 comments

Bodie-grave001

I had wanted to go to Bodie ever since I first heard of the place.  It’s a Gold Rush ghost town that lingered into the modern era, a place of gambling halls and fancy girls, murders in the street and four graveyards — a place that lived long enough that it has gas pumps and some electric wires, but is so inaccessible and isolated that people walked away, leaving everything behind.

Even with modern transportation, Bodie is a long ways away.  We left San Francisco early in the morning, drove up and through Yosemite, and came down on the eastern side of the Sierras.  We’d waited to go until September, when the oppressive oven heat had died down somewhat but the passes hadn’t snowed closed yet.  Our campsite, near a little creek, was shaded by aspens turned to gold.  It had a water tap and a pit toilet.  We had the place all to ourselves.

We waited to make the rest of the drive into Bodie until morning, unwilling to face the washboard road until we were sure we’d have enough time to see everything.  The State Park Service oversees the ghost town now, making sure the old buildings don’t fall down.  There is much to see: roulette wheels and crystal chandeliers, striped cotton mattresses and coffins for sale.  The church. The rusted-out old cars.  The horse-drawn hearse.

I poked around the graveyards while my friend Samuel toured the old mine.  In its heyday, Bodie dug out $30 million in gold, $1 million in silver.  The stamping mills worked around the clock, crushing the quartz stone to extract the precious metals.  Bodie would have been loud then.  Now all I could hear was the wind.

Elizabeth my Wife

Elizabeth my Wife

I knew Bodie had been as wealthy as it was dangerous, but I was shocked to see how much remained in the graveyard.  There were plenty of graves marked only with boards, but there were also ornate metal fences, wrought or cast iron, shipped from back east or carted over the Sierras.  There were plenty of marble gravestones, too.  Those would have been heavy to drag over the mountains before paved roads were built and yet the survivors felt strongly that their griefs required permanent monuments, ones that stand decades after the town was abandoned.

Who was Elizabeth?  She had no last name on her marker.  Did she lie there alone or were her children with her?  Was her husband there, with no one to buy him a stone to remember his name?  Or had he loaded all he could on a mule or into a wagon, into his pickup or his car, and left her and all they’d shared behind?

Here was a love that left stone flowers to brighten her grave, but left no last name to keep her memory alive.

I wondered if she knew all the songs the wind could sing.  Did she sing them to herself when the wind fell silent?  Did those left behind in the graveyards keep each other company at the end of the day, when the tourists left and the rangers locked up and the fat full moon rose over the desert?

I was glad when Samuel returned from his tour, when it was time to get back in our car and head back to our campsite.  We may have been alone there, but it didn’t seem as lonely as Bodie.

***

Bodie’s Wards Cemetery was a cemetery of the week.  It also appears in Wish You Were Here, the book of my cemetery adventure essays.

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Threes

Posted on February 25, 2014 | 13 comments
Where is this lovely churchyard? All the epitaphs I can make out are in English.

Where is this lovely churchyard? All the epitaphs I can make out are in English. Photo by Blair Apperson.

Twenty years ago this week, my friend Blair got word that the liver surgery he’d undergone wasn’t successful and he had six months to live.  I can remember that, because he and his husband watched the Oscars after they got the news.

Blair went through a potlatch phase, where he gave his things away.  He gave me a box of cemetery photos that he had taken on his travels.  Nothing was labeled.  It felt weird to sit down with him, knowing that he was dying, and ask him to tell me about the graveyards he’d visited.  He told me some good stories, but he couldn’t remember where everything had been taken — and he’d made no notes.

All the same, I used a bunch of his photos in Death’s Garden: Relationships with Cemeteries, the first book I edited all by myself.  Blair didn’t live to see the book finished.  After it was done, after he was gone, I put his photos into sleeves and filed them away in a binder. I couldn’t look at them without thinking of him.

Kids playing football in the graveyard.

Kids playing football in the graveyard. Photo by Blair Apperson.

This month, I wanted to write about Black History for the Cemetery of the Week — and I remembered Blair’s photos.  I pulled them out again, but they remain just as mysterious to me as they did then.

If you can help me identify any of these graveyards, I would sure appreciate it.  I think they were taken in the Bahamas, maybe at Saba, but I don’t really know.  I know it’s a long shot, but I’m really hoping someone will recognize some of these images and be able to identify them for me at last.

Family plot in the backyard.

Family plot in the backyard. Photo by Blair Apperson.

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Object

Posted on February 3, 2014 | 6 comments
Rain gutter in Buena Vista Park, San Francisco

Broken headstone in Buena Vista Park, San Francisco

Mary Jo Bole was in town for the summer, doing an artist-in-residency stint at the Headlands Center for the Arts. I was trying to show her a good time, but although we’d known each other for years via mail art and a shared love of cemeteries, we really didn’t know each other well. I didn’t want to tell her where we were going. I hoped she’d enjoy the surprise.

We pulled up into my old neighborhood, the lower slopes of Ashbury Heights, and searched for a parking space. That Saturday morning was one of those perfect San Francisco days that make you forget that the fog will roll in around noon and you won’t see the sun again for a week. We could see for miles across the bay.

Gutter in Buena Vista Park

Gutter in Buena Vista Park

Buena Vista Park was relatively abandoned that morning. I remember when the raspberry bushes used to hang heavy and laden over the paths and we could eat ourselves full of berries on our way to breakfast in Lower Haight, but those days were over. The neighbors had finally tired of men having sex in the bushes. The hillside looked as if it had been clear-cut, brown grass dying in the dirt beneath the elderly Monterey pines.

I led MJ to the path above the children’s playground. The paths are paved in asphalt and short retaining walls of fitted stone hold the hillsides back above them. In the gap between wall and path runs a narrow gutter, less than a foot wide. It is lined with marble, an elegant, creepy touch lost on most visitors to the park.

Our outing was a little late in the year to be optimal. In the spring, after the rains have stopped, the Friends of Park and Rec host a work day to clear the gutters in the park. If I’d been thinking, I would have brought a broom to shift the eucalyptus leaves around. Instead, I kicked the oak leaves up with my tennis shoe, looking for an inscription.

One of the nice neighbors in a rose-pink jogging suit stopped to ask, “Did you lose something?”

“No,” I said, flustered by her niceness. I could already guess she wasn’t going to like what I was going to say. “The gutter is lined with grave markers from the old Laurel Hill Cemetery. You can still read some of them, but I can’t remember exactly where the ones with inscriptions are.”

“You’re joking,” she blurted.

Rain gutter in Buena Vista

Rain gutter lined with broken headstones in Buena Vista Park

“No.” I stopped kicking at the leaves to make eye contact with her. “It says so on the signs as you enter the park.”

“Really?” MJ crowed.

“Yeah.”

Once I uncovered one name, the others were easy to find.

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Juxtaposition

Posted on January 26, 2014 | 5 comments
Broken bud

Broken bud

This week’s photo challenge is to show two things side by side that comment on each other.  I like the juxtaposition of the broken rosebud on the gravestone beside the lovely pink rosebush behind it.

Broken buds like this one are often found on the monuments to Victorian children.  It’s hard to imagine a more perfect illustration of a parent’s shock and sadness when faced with burying their child, the sense of the beauty and potential cut short.  I couldn’t imagine what that kind of loss would feel like until I had an irreplaceable bud of my own.

I took this photo on a blisteringly hot afternoon in Sacramento’s Old City Cemetery. The Heritage Rose Group of the Friends of the Cemetery carefully tend the antique roses.  The cemetery’s website has this wonderful quote on it: “Many of these antique roses were brought across to California in the holds of ships or carried in wagon trains by early pioneers… Because roses are propagated by taking a piece of the original to start a new plant, they are, in essence, the same plant.  Therefore, roses in a Mandarin’s garden in old China or Empress Josephine’s famous 18th-century French garden are now planted in Sacramento’s Historic Rose Garden” in the cemetery.

I love the idea of these immortal flowers blooming and fading and blooming again over the centuries, thriving atop the graves of people who are gone to bloom again in another garden.

***

My other posts about the Sacramento City Cemetery:

A lamb on another child’s grave

Do not bury me in the cold ground.

Interview with one of the tour guides.

Upcoming tours & garden events in the cemetery.

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