Cemeteries

Thursday

Bill Kauffman

An introduction to presidential grave-hunting

Where better to talk about dead presidents than over beer and wings at Jim's Saloon in East Pembroke, New York, three days before Millard Fillmore’s birthday? Across the table from me is Pat Weissend, a convivial bank manager and former museum director who has visited the gravesites of all thirty-nine dead presidents and all but two of the forty-three dead vice presidents of the United States. (The hard-to-get veeps are Walter Mondale, whose ashes have yet to be interred under the cold hard Minnesota ground, and Nelson Rockefeller, whose private and inaccessible burial spot is the Holy Grail of the grave-hunting community.

presidents

Tuesday

Amelia Butler-Gallie

The peculiar American attitude toward death

Dying sensibly has always eluded Americans — from Elvis to Houdini — and that’s before you even get to the funeral part. In fact, in America, something peculiar has occurred over the last century. Traditional obsequies have fallen out of favor as Americans increasingly opt for “anything but” the conventional when it comes to final resting places: that is, no more six feet under. According to the National Funeral Directors Association (NFDA), the majority of Americans now choose cremation, with the rate expected to surpass 80 percent by 2045. Ecofriendly departures — think hemp coffins or ashes strewn over a living coral reef — are also becoming more popular; 60 percent of respondents to one recent survey expressed an interest in “green funeral options.

death

Friday

Bill Kauffman

The cemeteries of New York State

Prose may be deathless, but authors are not — and some of us honor those who compose with visits to where they decompose. I’m afraid that I am one such pilgrim: heck, my wife left her bridal bouquet at the grave of Jack Kerouac in Edson Cemetery in Lowell, Massachusetts. The epitaph for “Ti Jean” is “He Honored Life”; so, paradoxically, do those who make sepulchral sorties. The noted poet Steve Huff knows his way around a necropolis, and he brings us along for the ride in his new book, Resting Among Us: Authors’ Gravesites in Upstate New York from Syracuse University Press. Huff wants “to help raise Upstate New Yorkers’ awareness of our literary heritage.” New York schools have failed miserably at this task.

gravesites

Wednesday

Teresa Mull

The problem facing US cemeteries

On a hillside on the outskirts of my town is an expansive cemetery where more than 20,000 of Philipsburg’s ancestors have been laid to rest since 1869. For decades, its thirty or so acres have been cared for by three dedicated men who dig and fill graves, mow and trim the grass, repair equipment, patch and plow roads, maintain old headstones and gather leaves “for next to nothing,” as Paul Springer puts it. This work must “go on constantly,” says Paul, but changes in the mores surrounding death mean “generating the income necessary to support these activities is becoming impossible.” Paul is my friend and one of those indispensable do-ers small towns across the country rely on to keep things ticking.

cemeteries