In Repose Blog

Glow in the Dark

The following article was written by Elena Moonn for In Repose

“I swear, it was a glow-in-the-dark cross!” Some things simply have to be seen to be believed.  A friend of mine told me about a cemetery they pass on the way to and from work.  Someone had put a glow-in-the-dark cross on a grave.  People can be very creative when it comes to memorializing a loved one that has passed over; skateboards on a teenager's headstone, crystals left on a monument, even a glass case with a treasured doll attached to a grave stone, among other things.  This was the first time I had heard of a glow-in-the-dark cross.

My mind created an image the moment I heard about the cross.  Several designs emerged from my slightly twisted imagination.  The favorite was an eerie ectoplasm green wood grain version.  It seemed to satisfy the need for it to be a little creepy.  It was after all in a graveyard... at night.

The cemetery was in an area that I only occasionally passed through and rarely at night and it would have to be a night time visit.  Being there after sunset was not an issue, I actually like graveyards at night.  They are quite peaceful and calming, if you allow them to be.  It was more a matter of traveling.  Living in a rural area does have its limitations.  The cemetery was on one of the roads into the larger city in the area and was not the road I would normally use.  At least the cemetery was in an accessible place; no long roads or pad-locked gates.  Then opportunity presented its self.  Being in the right part of town at the right time of day.  Now my problem was remembering where on the road the cemetery was located.  I tend to drive a bit on the high side of the speed limit and the search would require me driving on the low side, which was a challenge.  The graveyard was found on a curve with a driveway that would allow me to safely pull off the road.

Finally, I see not one, but two crosses.  They were about half way through the cemetery and half way between the drive where I was parked and a second drive at the other end.  There was no way I was walking through there at night with heels on; forget seeing critters running from my car lights.  I tried taking a picture from my car, but the crosses were too far away.  Reviewing the shots revealed nothing but a chain link fence with a dark background.

But I was not to be deterred.  As luck would have it I had the opportunity to return the next night with my son.  The second visit I parked just off the road, doing my best to stop where I would have a good shot of the crosses.  My son tried to take the the picture, but even with the zoom lens they were still too far away.  I really wanted the photograph, so with no thought about walking into a graveyard at night, I grabbed the camera, set the car flashers and headed for the fence.  As I got closer it looked like three crosses, but it was a reflection in a polished granite monument.  Finding the best angle, resting my arms on the top of the fence I got the first picture.  That was when I heard it... the rustling of the leaves at the base of the fence.  A rabbit would have run at my approach, it was still a bit too cool for snakes to be moving around much and there was not enough of a breeze to make that much noise.

The only thing to fear is fear its self... and maybe zombies, but I was seriously thinking there is a reason for giving into the fight or flight reflex.  I wanted a second picture and though it was tempting to run I kept telling myself not to look down.  If I couldn't see it, it could only be rustling leaves.  Did I mention I didn't hear leaves rustling anywhere else?  With the second photo taken, I headed back to the car... quickly.  After all, rustling leaves could slip through the chain links.

At home I look at the photos on my computer.  As it turned out there were not glow-in-the-dark crosses.  They were solar powered; gone was my ectoplasm green. They were a glowing white that did not give off light, only holding the shape of a cross and illuminating the white frame.

That gave me something to think about.  Solar powered... energy from the sun... the source of life on this Earth.  The sun lighting the darkness, but the cross only lighting the form, not anything around it... a pale imitation of the original... form with little substance.  I almost wish it had been ectoplasm green.  It wouldn't have given me as much to think about.  .....

The Paper Flower Funeral Club

Special article by Contributor Jamie Sue Austin

I’m part of  a group called the Paper Flower Funeral Club.  Often many beautiful, small, cemeteries are left neglected during secular remembrance holidays. With the residents families dead and gone there is no one left to honor their memories. Our group is dedicated to the revitalization of old, forgotten cemeteries through the placement of handmade paper flowers. 

(Here is one of our members making a purple rose  J We try to use bright colors so they can be seen from the roadside.)

This year I will be heading the placement ceremony at a small local cemetery.  The placement will be on October 30^th. October 30^th is often known as Mischief Night or Devil’s Night in the United States.  It is not uncommon for acts of trespassing and vandalism to occur on this night.  In part an October 30^th placement protests the negative acts conducted on that date, however the main reasoning behind selecting the date is because its proximity to the pagan holiday of Samhain which celebrates the yearly harvest and pays honor to the dead.  It is believed that the veil between the living life and the afterlife becomes thinner as Samhain approaches allowing those that have passed before to hear the petitions of their supplanters.

Heading the placement is a matter I take very seriously. What I say as we place flowers on the graves represents our intentions to honor those who came before us for their contributions to our lives.   In the same way that someone who presides over a funeral must feel a twinge of guilt for not knowing the correct thing to say I too am facing a considerable amount of frustration in selecting the right words.  How do I sum up the lifelong contributions of strangers who, most likely, are from various religious, cultural, and socio-economic backgrounds?  My audience is 100 years dried into dust beneath the clay, forgotten, and un-revered.  How do I emphasis our connection to them? 

You see, nothing exists in a vacuum.  The decisions made by the bones below when they were with flesh are as real and with consequence as the decisions we make today.  They built the roads we drive on, formed the companies we work for, settled the towns we live in,  and created the law and common practices we abide by.  The local culture we experience now is  result of their constant tinkering.   The lessons we have learned from our collective past were hard taught at their expense.   The water leeched from the remains beneath our feet generations before our birth is the same water in our cup today.  And while we wish we were much removed from then, untouchable by the cold and quiet grave, we are but one breath from becoming the same as and a part of them.  What words best connect the beating butterfly wings of the past to the winds of today?

It’s hard to convey the sense of unity that we all should feel.  If the footprints we leave behind in our daily walks were not washed away by rain or wind or sun… if they were collected, catalogued, and kept for prosperity… if our fleeting thoughts were bottled and shelved, we could see our effect on the world.  We could watch the piles of footprints grow, build warehouses for our  bottled dreams, and know the intimate details of the lives before ours.  We would see the path carved for us by the actions of our ancestors.  We could better understand how to carve a path for our decedents.

But, we are fickle temporal creatures.  Eternity stretches out around us in all directions and we see only a glimmer of a fraction, a mere glimpse of the now.  The past is a far away thing, a distant fairy tale, a story we tell our children.  The future is a wistful dream, a wisp of white smoke rising in the distance; intangible and ethereal.  The bits in between are ancillary characters to our personal dramas.  How can I explain a concept that I barely grasp myself?

Jamie Sue, I think you already, and most eloquently, have.--Candace

Forever Remembered

-Jamie Sue Austin for In Repose

New high tech grave stones will allow people to view photos and video of the deceased through use of a bar code.

In a way it’s ironic.  We spend out entire lives fighting categorized, screaming out that we are not faceless numbers to be devoured by the societal machinery around us, only to find our lasting legacy burned into a barcode. 

When in a cemetery we cannot help but to wonder about the person beneath the stone.  What they looked like, how they laughed, who their family was, what they enjoyed in life.  In our minds eye we reconstruct them, bringing them to life in our imaginations if only for a moment. Now with the push of a cell phone button we can vividly recount their life in a swirl of images and sound.  We can even sign their guestbook. 

The families would surely take comfort in these gravesite visits—being able to recall on demand the face that fades from memory. But, how much of this change in headstones reflects not our desire to remain connected to our dead, but to our own voyeuristic tendencies?  At what point do we cross the line between honoring the dead and leering into their past private lives?

Neptune Memorial Reef

I'm normally vaguely fearful of water, but I'd actually like to visit this place some day. What a fabulous idea. Click on the link below to watch a little minute long video. Enjoy a tiny tour of a beautiful place.

Neptune Memorial Reef

"Safety Coffins" Just in Case You are Buried Alive

The abnormal psychopathological fear of being buried alive is called taphophobia, (from the Greek taphos, meaning "grave".) Literally it translates into "fear of graves." Before the era of modern medicine, this fear was not entirely irrational.

During the cholera epidemics of the 18th and 19th centuries worries reached quite a peak, and many inventions were patented at that time, but history has recorded many cases of live burial.

When is a dead person, really, all the way dead? It has not always been so clear. Physicians and undertakers have employed many unusual methods to try to determine if there is any life left in the body laying before them.

From a 2001 Wired News Article:

Administering enemas of tobacco smoke to the suspected dead had a strong following among many members of the medical profession in the 17th and 18th centuries.

Other doctors preferred to insert hot pokers into various orifices, pinch nipples with pliers, and vigorously yank on the tongue of a presumed corpse in order to ascertain that their patients were quite dead.

Tongue-pulling became so popular that a device was created to automate the procedure. The suggested modus operandi was to clamp the maybe-dead person’s tongue to the machine and then turn a crank that rapidly moved the tongue in and out of the patient’s mouth.

This procedure had to be continued for at least three hours, doctors believed, so a village’s most-easily amused person was usually assigned to the task.

Fear of being buried alive was elaborated to the extent that those who could afford it would make all sorts of arrangements for the construction of a "safety coffin" to ensure this would be avoided (e.g. glass lids for observation, ropes to bells for signaling, and breathing pipes for survival until rescued).

In 1995 a modern safety coffin was patented by Fabrizio Caselli. His design included an emergency alarm, intercom, a flashlight, breathing apparatus, and both a heart monitor and stimulator.

Jamie Sue Austin who writes for In Repose, sends us a link to Vermonter.com that has photos of the grave of Timothy Clark Smith, who, presumably, is no longer affected by taphophobia.

Cemetery Picnic

Today we are reminded that cemeteries are more than just a place for grieving...An article for In Repose by Lucy Brite.

“Let's take our lunch and go to the cemetery,” I can hear my mother saying on a warm spring morning.  If that sounds strange, it wasn't to us children, and all of us looked forward to the outing.  I know some people avoid cemeteries, considering them morbid or sad places; thanks to my mother, my family never thought like that. 

Since we were babies who could enjoy the warm weather in our portable playpens, through  pre-school years when we could bring a doll or board game to play, we felt at home on the gentle grassy slope beside the Live Oak that was the resting place for a large granite monument bearing our  family name in deep cut letters, and several smaller markers of white marble placed like pillows at the heads of family members who had gone before.  Some of the older stones had dates within range of the Civil War.  Their occupants had not seen daylight since the visitors to this cemetery would have worn much different clothing from the shorts my mother worked in, kneeling carefully among their resting places.

There was space not occupied by graves, and we came to know  that  space would hold the rest of us  “someday” when we needed it.

It seemed natural to be there playing in the shade, while our mother and any children who were old enough worked at planting or pruning shrubs, weeding, scrubbing benches or headstones: whatever needed to be done to spruce up the family plot. 

She entertained us with occasional stories about those whose graves we were tending, and it felt as if they must look on  approvingly at what we were doing to the place. 

We did our work in the morning while it was cool, pausing for an occasional drink from the short length of hose Mamma had brought to connect to the nearby spigot.  Any plant clippings or pulled weeds we generated were placed neatly in the trash bag we had brought for the purpose.

When she judged we had done enough, we would place the flowers she had cut from out yard in the container braced in its metal stand.   (Mamma always used fresh flowers or live plants.  Artificial flowers were all right, she said, if you couldn't get out to the cemetery often.) Next we'd wash up in the hose, admire what we had done, and eat our sandwiches on the benches. 

Our plot had benches for visitors.  Mamma said that Grandmother and Grandfather always offered a visitor a seat, and she made sure that custom continued in their final repose. 

There were rules, of course, but mostly they involved staying away from any burial preparations or funeral in progress.  Also, we couldn't “run wild and shout,” she explained, because other people who were visiting graves might be disturbed.   

We couldn't interfere with the work of the groundskeepers either. Mamma knew the groundskeepers well and talked to them about keeping weedeaters away from her new Liriope edging she was installing, or watering, or the sorry state of our present culture that made it necessary to use poor quality old vases and containers for flowers to keep the good ones from being stolen. It would never have been so in the old days, they all agreed.  The groundskeepers loved my mother, and would have agreed with her in any case.  They thought she made our plot look nicer than just about anybody's, and appreciated the fact that she and other family members took a personal, hands-on interest. 

Mamma was nothing if not hands-on.  She could not understand – and said so – why other families who had “able bodied men and big strapping boys” were not out there cleaning up the graves of their ancestors.  Ironically, she herself was just a bit over five feet tall and slightly built, but no matter,  If we  took a stroll through the markers after lunch, she would pause to silently pull an accusatory weed next to a headstone or straighten a pot or vase. 

As we got older, school and related activities took up more of our time, and visits to the cemetery were limited to special requests to help Mamma with something heavy or replace a major plant that she couldn't handle.  Maybe she wanted to avoid placing us in an awkward position, or somehow setting us apart from our peers. 

She needn't have worried.  What she gave us with those early childhood visits to family graves was invaluable: a sense of family, of continuity of the past into the present and the future, a respect for the property of others and their privacy.  Today most of us can't pass a cemetery, especially an old southern cemetery, without being drawn to visit, even though we know none of our family lies among its graves.

We children all looked forward to helping Mamma tend the family graves.  We didn't find it strange or morbid.  In fact, those visits to weed and trim and scrub instilled in us a sense of family, of continuity of the past into the present and the future. 

Double Decker Gravesites

The Brits are running out of cemetery space to bury caskets. Despite a cremation rate of nearly 70% (fully double the rate of America's) London expects to run out of burial sites in the coming years. So Tuesday the British government approved the doubling up idea. Cemetery officials will now have the authority to exhume remains of old graves, deepen the hole, rebury those remains and then bury a new body on top of the old one.

This seems very odd to me and fraught with potential difficulties. How will the headstone work?  Will we add on the second person's information or should there be two stones? Side by side or on either end? What if the first person loved art deco and the second was a minimalist? Will the graves be shared by members of the same sex or will we put a young soldier over a grandmother?

Hmmm. How about the family members and when they visit? Can you imagine the scene on some holidays or weekends when the families of both of the deceased arrive at the same time? Jostling for elbow room, picking the prime contemplative spots to stand near the grave, positioning flowers and wreaths in what, first come first serve order? Maybe whoever brings the biggest arrangement wins? The quiet family will be appalled at the noisy celebratory one, the family who loves fresh flowers will be aghast at the bearers of the silk or plastic variety? How can this possibly work?

And why not just go ahead and consider a triple decker grave site? If we have a space problem now, certainly we will have another one in the future.