CEMETERY COP: Chapter Four
For a year now folks on Facebook have been asking me to write a book about my work in a number of cemeteries. The process has begun. Here for your reading pleasure is the fictionalized true tales from a Cemetery Cop. CHAPTER FOUR At first glance the grounds at the cemetery – or any cemetery, really – seems like a mini-city. The headstones rise from the ground like apartment towers. Though the Greeks didn’t create the term, two compound Greek words inform it: necropolis – City of the Dead. It’s how Europeans described the landscape of graveyards at the turn of the 19th century. The more sensitive modern term is resting place. You wouldn’t know it from the activity at Beacon Hill. As with the mausoleums, the graves themselves have become reflections of the world of the living. Flowers, wreaths, toys, balloons, food and every manner of topiary you could imagine. It’s hard to tell sometimes where the focus on the deceased actually is in the equation. Some of the graves resemble garish and gaudy concrete gardens filled with lanterns, bird feeders, cement cherubs and angels and other religious iconography. It drives the maintenance staff nuts because they’re responsible for mowing the grass and more times than not end up running over errant or misplaced lawn ornaments. The complaints from the families of the deceased is unending. They firmly believe the damage is deliberate. The truth is the damage is often unavoidable. The compromise is families who do their own landscaping or bring in professional companies to do it for them. It has become an industry unto itself. It’s a study in contrasts too. Not just by culture or religion, but by era. The historically gothic gravestone made of limestone or granite etched with English script and chiselled serif fonts has given way to foot stones which designate individual members of a family plot or where there are tight grave formations. The other is machine-polished marble headstones so reflective as to radiate sun-light off them on extremely bright summer days. In lieu of true material wealth, even the poorest of souls can rest eternally in a plot that looks like the front cover of an issue of Better Homes & Gardens. With cemetery land being at a premium now the administrators are looking for new ways to generate revenue. The misconception is that it’s a scam. What is actually happening has to do with families in need of eternal care for their loved ones. That includes the mowing of the grass and possibly planting of flowers in the summer or having a wreath placed on the grave by staff at Christmas time for a minimum of 99 years. Those costs rise every year but the families pay for it only once – at the time of interment. You can see the dilemma. People who were buried 75 or 100 years ago are still receiving personal care. That means the newest burials are subsidizing all those pre-existing graves. And as land runs out who is going to pay for all that upkeep on half-a-million graves in 30 or 40 years? It’s a conundrum that all cemeteries are now finding themselves in. I went to visit another graveyard in the city where some of my very distant relatives were buried in an effort to put names and dates into my ongoing genealogy research. This graveyard was very old and these relatives had died in the early 20th century. The info on them was still contained on index cards. The staff was able to locate the document rather quickly and it indicated that the eternal care had expired. There was an amount owing of $60 to continue the service. They asked me if I wanted to step up. As I was only remotely related I found it hard to justify. The grave, which didn’t have a headstone at all, would eventually grow over and be forgotten. The deceased would still occupy the space forever whether I had them mow the grass or not. And this cemetery was nearly full. Sometime soon they will run into a financial problem. I certainly hope the funeral industry figures out a way of sustaining it. The Americans have the same issues and have introduced the unsavoury idea of grave renting. That is, the deceased is interred in a plot for X number of years before they’re exhumed, put in a mass grave, and the single plot is resold to a current family in need; it’s capitalism at its heartless, pragmatic worst. Canada has not stooped to such a tactic. Instead, they’re innovating. Many plots are bought decades in advance for entire families. As we’ve seen in census studies modern families are no longer as big as they once were. Many are selling their extra, unused, plots back to the cemeteries. Meanwhile, the most common and accepted way is cremation, of course. There has been a cultural shift to less organic funerals and a bigger push toward either keeping the ashes indefinitely in the family home, interring the ashes in mausoleums or having them scattered. Ashes to ashes… Beacon Hill has a forested area dedicated to memorial scatterings for loved ones. Technically you can scatter human ashes anywhere, but many prefer the peace of mind of doing it in a cemetery without the formality of a graveside event. Markers and plaques are erected in the wooded area as a memoriam. These areas are beautifully landscaped with unobtrusive stones paths, wood chips, wind chimes and even pastoral music piped into the area through hidden speakers buried beneath the floor of the forest. The maintenance staff is incredible at their jobs and to make visitors feel they are in a natural rather than man-made setting. With the historic tree base already in place the hills and valley and existing contours of the property lend themselves to nature’s beauty amongst the clatter of the city surrounding it. It’s a green oasis of sorts and it invites misuse of the area by those who mistake the cemetery for run-of-the-mill parkland. Many seem perturbed when told that a picnic among the graves of people they’re not related to is inappropriate. I’m reminded of an incident where a woman was visiting her mother’s grave and beside it was a man visiting his mother’s grave at the same time. It was a warm and sunny day so the man felt compelled to not only picnic on the plot – but remove most of his clothes. He wasn’t quite naked, but it was very inappropriate. The woman visiting her mother was incensed. She keep looking for me to file a complaint. I went by the plot and told the guy that he was more than free to visit his mother, but disrobing would not be tolerated. He told me to piss off and continued his sunbathing. I was technically powerless to do anything except file a formal complaint on the woman’s behalf and note the plot number to the cemetery staff. But there’s a fine line. Some belief systems encourage the grieving to feast with the dead. Others have them sit for hours beside the graves to pray or contemplate. The first known lawn furniture – loveseats made of wrought-iron – was designed in New Orleans for those who wanted to lounge with the dearly departed; that tradition was eventually adopted to a mundane work-a-day use by people sitting in their own backyards, but the origin began in cemeteries not unlike Beacon Hill. There are benches and loveseats and entire stoops wrapped around some of the biggest and oldest trees in the facility. There are no picnic tables despite requests from visitors. Eating there is not encouraged especially as it attracts animals. Again, the cemetery is not a park despite how it might look. We had a long game of hide and seek with one visitor in the cemetery who we believed to be a regular that insisted on randomly placing fresh apples atop tombstones. No one could get a handle on who it was. But we began to get complaints because the food rots and spoils on the headstone – marking and dirtying the shiny polished surface. It was never an issue until one particular family member found that it was happening on her husband’s tombstone once a week. She wanted the culprit caught. She demanded a full investigation. As much as I don’t blame her for not wanting the grave defaced, her outrageous reaction was over-stated. The apple was usually picked clean by the animals in the cemetery leaving nothing but the peel. Eventually we found who was doing it. It was a very nice older Chinese fellow who walked the entire cemetery every morning on his way to visiting relatives in the Gothic mausoleum. No one would have suspected. He dressed in what looked like a loose-fitting burlap overcoat with flowing black work pants. And he carried a satchel. I always assumed it was candles and whatever he needed to honour the relatives he was visiting in the mausoleum. Turns out it was full of apples. Ironically, he never placed an apple in the mausoleum. We told him that he was very generous in honouring others who were buried there but the families of these people had asked that he stopped. He didn’t understand exactly, but the apple offerings stopped right after that. As someone once said to me in passing, “It would be the most idyllic setting in the world if not for all the dead people.” It sounds aloof. It sounds disrespectful but there’s a dark, sardonic edge to working among those who can no longer speak for themselves. It makes you question everything about the universe. Why are we here? Why do we die? And why do we keep our dead in tiny cities and build fences around them to keep them locked inside for all eternity? It’s hard to imagine what the world would look like if all the cemeteries that ever existed were still where they were originally built. Beacon Hill is an amalgam of four or five historic cemeteries. Many were moved from other locations as the urban sprawl encroached and development land, rather than the dead, became the biggest commodity. Beacon Hill became a collection box for the city’s former citizens. And who knows how many bodies were actually left in those gothic sandboxes when the construction equipment waited to over-turn the soil and drive re-bar into the ground. It plays out in your mind’s eye like that scene from the movie Poltergeist. It’s not a stretch to believe that headstones were relocated and not a lot of the bodies from those graves. I feel badly for the ancestors who may be looking for the final resting places of their great-great-great relations. Their names are on stones in Beacon Hill but no one can confirm if the people are actually buried there or not. Plaques do indicate that this might be the case. I also adopted, as part of my job, the role of sentry. Tens of thousands of graves will never again be attended by living family members because genealogy lines have long disappeared or relatives unaware of where their ancestors might even be located. I’m undecided as to whether there’s an afterlife or whether the souls of the dead remain where their bodies reside but maybe my presence gave those who had been long forgotten some comfort. As a home to generations of immigrants, it’s any wonder we know where anyone is buried at all. Fortunately, Beacon Hill keeps meticulous records. The staff can usually find anyone known to be buried there. The service is necessary when matching the newly deceased with pre-paid plots. But it’s also important for those trying to find answers to questions about their origins. I used the service there long before taking the security job. Unlike the other cemetery where they wanted me to front the eternal care bill, Beacon Hill’s records aren’t on old yellowed index cards. It’s automated. With that it was comforting to know that there was a place to visit my family even if they weren’t quite “here” anymore. Of course, other uses of the service involve tracking the famous and the infamous. Historic tours are frequent and informative but visitors sometimes come on their own quests for very personal reasons. I had occasion to play tour guide on days where not much was happening. It was always fun to drive people around to the place where someone in history was laid to rest and watch their reaction. It was both morbid and curious. I’d done the same thing many times with my wife when walking around New Orleans to see the graves of Marie Leveau (the Witch Queen of New Orleans) and pirate Jean Lafitte or the hundreds of Hollywood movie stars buried all over Los Angeles.
On other occasions it meant helping family find graves that they hadn’t visited in a long time or had missed the funerals entirely. It was heart wrenching taking people to the site of their loved ones. Sometimes the family member was mistaken in where they thought the grave was. It took patients not to contradict them. I’d often help them look but would usually offer to take them to the office to have a records search done so that the location of the grave could be pinpointed precisely. Many times we’d return to the spot where we’d been looking – and find the grave either had no marker on it or was close by.
The only appropriate thing was to offer them condolences, a box of tissues, and their privacy. For many it was the end of a long, hard, emotional journey. For me, I was in charge of driving the taxicab through hell and back. I never got used to it.
