Tag Archives: postaweek2014

Weekly Photo Challenge: Contrasts

Posted on June 28, 2014 | 6 comments
I know I just used this photo the other night on the Yokohama Cemetery of the Week, but I wanted to talk a little more about it.

I know I just used this photo the other night on the Yokohama Cemetery of the Week, but I wanted to talk a little more about it.

One of the goals of my trip to Japan was to visit the Foreigners’ Cemetery in Yokohama. Because I wasn’t sure what the status of the wifi would be in our air b’n’b apartment,  I did my research beforehand.  I discovered that the cemetery was only open on Saturday and Sunday afternoons between noon and 4.  Since we would only be in Japan across one weekend, that was when we’d have to make the trip.

My husband Mason is a firm believer in doing the one thing you really want to do on vacation on the very first day possible.  By that logic, we should have gone on Saturday, but we absolutely needed to do laundry. And they predicted rain. And my legs ached from a bad fall in Kyoto the day before.

So we put the trip off until Sunday — and woke to rain.  One of my sources said the cemetery would be closed in bad weather, but I hoped a gentle rain wouldn’t be considered bad enough.

I lost that gamble.

All that way to Japan, then the walk to the station in Tokyo, then the train ride to Yokohama, and the hike up the hill to the graveyard: only to find the cemetery paths blocked with chains.

I would have cried, but since none of the cemetery volunteers were in evidence, that wouldn’t have done me much good.  Instead, we visited the Tin Toy Museum nearby, which was highly entertaining, and went to a waffle restaurant for lunch.

The cemetery never opened, so we shot what photos we could over the fence.

I really like the photo above, since it shows the variety of monuments in the cemetery.  There’s the old mossy green tablet stone, more modern granite monuments (several of which look like books), and the tall upright Japanese square column.  I suspect the Westerners received full-body burials with a service performed by a Christian or Jewish authority, while the Japanese were cremated and their ashes interred beneath their monuments by Buddhist priests.

Maybe contrast isn’t the word I want so much as spectrum.  I love the cross-cultural spectrum of the Americans, English, Scots, French, Germans, Russians, and Japanese all lying together on the same hillside — and that only includes the languages I read on stones I could see from outside from the walls.

Despite the viciously hungry mosquitoes, the cemetery visit gave me a sense of peace.  The cemetery was an oasis away from the frenetic neighborhood where we were staying in Tokyo.  I’m disappointed I didn’t get to walk the paths, but without insect repellent, the trip would have been curtailed anyway.

I’ll go back some day — on the first possible day of my trip — but I’ll go back armed with bug spray.

***

This post was inspired by the WordPress Photo Challenge of the Week: http://dailypost.wordpress.com/dp_photo_challenge/contrasts/

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Spring

Posted on May 5, 2014 | 7 comments

Letty Lent’s gravestone at the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, Tarrytown, NY

In the spring of 2002, about this time of year, I took one of the best vacations of my life.  My husband Mason and I flew into Boston and rented a car, then we proceeded to visit 17 cemeteries in the next 11 days.  It was heavenly.

Boston was humid and bright.  We rested in the Central Burying Ground in the afternoon, watching squirrels chase each other with sticks.  The next day, on our way out of town, we stopped by Forest Hills Cemetery, where the forsythia bloomed in thickets.  Spring was coming, but it was early yet.

The Aylsworth family monument

The Aylsworth family monument

From Boston we drove to Providence.  One of the hills in Swan Point Cemetery burned with bright yellow daffodils. In addition, Swan Point had the most magnificent flowering trees I’ve ever seen.  To this day, I’ve seen nothing to compare with this weeping cherry.

Some cemeteries we visited were fascinating, if not especially pretty.  Gettysburg’s Soldiers National Cemetery seemed too macho to trouble itself with celebrating the season and breaking out in flowers.

That was not the case in Sleepy Hollow.  The perfumed air chimed with the songs of birds.  The river chattered to itself nearby, surrounded by trees bursting with vivid green leaves.  Spring made everything glad to be alive, especially me.

While I grew up in Michigan, spring felt like something you earned.  After the long gray winter, you pined for spring.  You celebrated every warm day, even if there were still snowdrifts in the shadows of the hills.  Every narcissus shoot and tulip stalk was worthy of celebration.  Spring was glorious, ephemeral, juicy and sweet.

In San Francisco, spring can be subtle.  In a normal year, the hills green up with every rainstorm.  The trees bloom in waves: the cherries, then the plums, then the apples.  Often a hard rain knocks the petals to the sidewalks before the beauty peaks.  The magnolias open their spectacular flowers, followed by the rhododendrons, the flowers singe in the sunshine — and then the show is over for another year.  The hills turn brown, the fog rolls in, and summer is long and cold.

My East Coast trip gave me almost two weeks of nothing but graveyards in springtime in the company of my husband.  Every moment was piquant and delicious and I savored them like you do the season’s first strawberries, bursting with sweetness and spring.

Here’s the challenge that started me off: Spring.

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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: On Top

Posted on April 21, 2014 | 6 comments
The oculus in the dome of the San Francisco Columbarium

The oculus in the dome of the San Francisco Columbarium

I went to a funeral last week in one of the most beautiful places in San Francisco.  I’ve written about the columbarium before — I’ve visited it many times — but this was the first time I’ve been there for the purpose for which it was intended.

The dead man was the husband of a friend of mine, father to a daughter the same age as my own.  I didn’t know him well, but I love his wife, so I went to the celebration of his life.  It was perfect:  a slide show, a board with stories from his life, cards made by his daughter’s classmates, a table with portrait photos of him and the urn with his ashes.

Their daughter came over to say hi.  I told her my daughter sent her love. Then I asked, “Are you on spring break this week?”

“No,” she said.  “I’m skipping school today.”

I could tell she was troubled by the forbidden aspect of it, so I said gently, “I think you have a good reason.”

Her face froze and she nodded, then dodged off before I could apologize. Oh, well done, I thought.  You made a child cry at her father’s funeral.  I tried to imagine anything I might have said that wouldn’t have reminded her of her loss, but I came up blank.

Remembering my brother’s funeral, almost 12 years ago now, and how I could barely speak for grief, I forgave myself, because really there are no magic words that make the loss stop hurting.  There is no making it better.  The person you love is gone forever and your love has nowhere to go, so it turns on you and hurts you.  All you can do is keep going on, treasuring your memories and slowly, slowly, let your loved one go.

For all that I write about graveyards and their denizens, I haven’t found any wisdom with which to comfort others.  We die, but life goes on.  This young girl will grow up, fall in love, travel, find work, live a rich and full life, but she has lost something she will never get back:  her innocence, her sense of security, her daddy’s love.  Around her, the Columbarium was filled with beauty and fascinating stories.  Outside, the day was perfect: a flawless blue sky, 65 degrees, green grass, bright sun, birdsong.  I’m sure she didn’t even see that.

I walked back to my car, inarticulate with emotion.  I hadn’t lost anything today, but I could see the future so clearly:  the deaths of my parents, my friends, maybe my husband although he’s sworn never to die.  I have been lucky to have only lost my brother and my grandparents so far.  I think growing up is not buying a house, or having a child, or pursuing a career.  For me, it means learning to face all the loss to come.

I have so much to learn.

After I went to the service, I found this link on twitter.  It’s advice on how to support someone who is grieving.  I think I will turn to it often as my friend survives her loss.

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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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