Posts Tagged ‘cemetery’
“Death is not easily escaped, try it who will; but every living soul among the children of men dwelling upon the earth goeth of necessity unto his destined place, where the body, fast in its narrow bed, sleepeth after feast.”*…
London’s Highgate Cemetery (and here)– the resting place of Karl Marx, George Eliot, Michael Faraday, Henry Moore, George Michael and many other notables– shows us just how hard it is to keep the dead buried. Ralph Jones explains…
“A cemetery’s a really bad idea,” said Ian Dungavell. It’s not a sentence I expected from someone paid to run one. But Dungavell, chief executive of the Friends of Highgate Cemetery Trust, is just as idiosyncratic as the site he presides over. The pair of us were walking around North London’s Highgate Cemetery in late February, as the snowdrops were beginning to flower and rain threatened overhead. As we walked, visitors approached to ask Dungavell, who knows more about the cemetery than perhaps anyone else alive, about specific graves. One woman wanted to know exactly where 19th-century artist Lizzie Siddal was buried. Dungavell tried to explain the route. “It’s slightly tricky if you turn left too soon,” he said. “Then if you turn left too late, we might not see you till tomorrow.”
Dungavell, who is 58 and speaks with the calm precision of an English head teacher, wasn’t speaking ill of his beloved Highgate when he said that a cemetery is a bad idea. He meant that the business of running one has become almost unsustainable. Highgate is the only cemetery in the United Kingdom to charge the public for entry, yet upkeep remains a struggle, costing at least $1.9 million a year. Highgate Cemetery is particularly fascinating because its fortunes have run the gamut—from high to rock bottom, back to high again. It isn’t as easy as it looks, keeping people in the ground.
I was visiting Highgate at a crucial juncture in its history. More change is afoot for this most famous of cemeteries; this “Disneyland of the dead,” in the words of Kenneth Greenway, the cemetery park manager at nearby Tower Hamlets Cemetery Park. To put it bluntly: Highgate, which hosts the bodies and ashes of around 173,000 people, is running out of space. What do you do when you can’t create new graves? You reuse the old ones. In March 2022, the UK Parliament granted the cemetery the right to “disturb human remains”—dig up graves to make space for new bodies—in its mission to combat this problem…
The fascinating (if mildly macabre) details: “Disneyland of the Dead,” from @ohhiralphjones.bsky.social in @longreads.com.
* Beowulf
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As we ponder posterity, we might recall that it was on this date in 1968 that Gram Parsons quit the Byrds, allegedly over concerns about a planned tour of South Africa, citing his opposition to the country’s apartheid policies. Parsons headed to France, became acquainted with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones (during the recording of Exiles On Main Street) and reintroduced Richards to country music. On returning to Los Angeles, Parsons formed The Flying Burrito Brothers.
Germanely to the piece featured above, Parsons died in 1973 of an overdose…
Although Parsons had said he wanted his body cremated at Joshua Tree and his ashes spread over the formation Cap Rock, Parsons’ stepfather organized a private ceremony in New Orleans and left the body in the care of a funeral home. But, to fulfill Parsons’ wishes, [Parson’s friend Phil] Kaufman and a friend stole both a hearse and his body and drove it to Joshua Tree. At Cap Rock Parking Lot, they poured gasoline into the open coffin and lit it, creating an enormous fireball. They were arrested and eventually fined $750.00, for stealing the coffin. What remained of Parsons’ body was buried in Garden of Memories Cemetery in Metairie, Louisiana.
The story brings Parsons fans out to a large rock flake known to rock climbers as ‘The Gram Parsons Memorial Hand Traverse’. At some point, someone added a slab that marked Parsons’ cremation to the memorial rock; that slab was removed by the U.S. National Park Service and is now at the Joshua Tree Inn. Joshua Tree park guides are given the option to tell the story of Parsons’ cremation during tours, but there is no mention of the act in official maps or brochures…
– source
“When you’re dead, they really fix you up”*…
For 87 years, nearly every day, a single train ran out of London and back. It left from a dedicated station near Waterloo built specifically for the line and its passengers. The 23-mile journey, which had no stops after leaving London, took 40 minutes. Along the way to their destination, riders glimpsed the lovely landscapes of Westminster, Richmond Park and Hampton Court — no mistake, as the route was chosen partly for its “comforting scenery”, as one of the railway’s masterminds noted.
How much comfort a route gives passengers isn’t a usual consideration for a train line. But this was no normal train line.
Many of the passengers on the train would be distraught. The others — those passengers’ loved ones — be dead. Their destination: the cemetery.
In operation from 1854 to 1941, the London Necropolis Railway was the spookiest, strangest train line in British history. It transported London’s dead south-west to Brookwood Cemetery, near Woking, in Surrey, a cemetery that was built in tandem with the railway. At its peak, from 1894 to 1903, the train carried more than 2,000 bodies a year.
It also transported their families and friends. Guests could leave with their dearly departed at 11:40am, attend the burial, have a funeral party at one of the cemetery’s two train stations (complete with home-cooked ham sandwiches and fairy cakes), and then take the same train back, returning to London by 3:30pm.
The pairing of grief and efficiency may seem a little jarring. It did then, too…
For the full story, hop aboard at “The passenger train created to carry the dead.”
* J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye
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As we struggle with our sugar hangovers, we might recall that today is Graveyard Day– or more politely, All Hallows or All Saints Day– a Christian celebration of all saints, “known and unknown.”
“The Forerunners of Christ with Saints and Martyrs,” Fra Angelico (c. 1423-4)
“Going up”*…
In special situations from ancient Egypt to modern New Orleans, the departed have been “buried” above ground. But this seemingly minority practice may become mainstream…
A skyscraper filled with corpses may sound morbid, but soon, such things may become a necessity. The earth is already packed with dead housed in oversized caskets that have been designed to outlive us all – so what are we going to do with the never-ending stream of human bodies as we face life’s greatest inevitability?…
More at “Cemeteries in the Sky: 7 Compact Vertical Burial Designs.”
* what Charon never had the occasion to say
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As we reconsider that investment in air rights, we might spare a rugged thought for Louis Dearborn L’Amour; he died on this date in 1988. While L’Amour wrote mysteries, science fiction, historical fiction, and non-fiction, he is surely best remembered as the author of westerns (or as he preferred, “frontier stories”) like Hondo and Sackett.. At the time of his death he was one of the world’s most popular writers; dozens of his stories had been made into films, and 105 of his works were in print (89 novels, 14 short-story collections, and two full-length works of nonfiction); as of 2010, over 320 million copies of his work had been sold.
L’Amour was interred in the Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery near Los Angeles. His grave is marked in a way that acknowledges that death was able to contain him in a way that he successfully resisted throughout his life: while his body is underground, his site is fenced in.
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