DAYS AMONG THE DEAD

The American Resting Place: Four Hunded Years of History Through Our Cemeteries and Burial Grounds by Marilyn Yalom; published May 15, 2008, Houghton-Mifflin

What, if anything, does one feel when faced with a cemetery? To some, a burial ground of any sort evokes a shudder and a wish to remain free and clear of its environs. To others, they elicit little to no reaction at all. However, cemeteries do have their devotees, and for them, they are intriguing, interesting, and even beloved sites for any number of reasons. Marilyn Yalom takes the last approach and presents her findings in The American Resting Place.

Over the course of several years, Marilyn and her son, Reid, journeyed across land and sea to exhaustively research American burying grounds--Marilyn wrote the text, Reid took over sixty (remarkable) accompanying photographs of what they'd seen. Besides a show-&-tell of over 250 communities of the dead, The American Resting Place details the history of how and why Americans have interred their deceased for over four centuries.

The earliest European settlers, including both the Spanish in Florida as well as the English Puritans in New England, utilized deaths' heads (skulls) alone in their decoration of America's first tombstones. Besides name and date information, the rare epitaph would typically read as an indictment to the living to remember that death is the inevitable end of us all. Grim, cheerless messages were exactly what graveyards were meant to convey--as a matter of fact, any place where burials occurred was almost exclusively known as a graveyard (or perhaps churchyard) in the U.S. until the 1850s-1860s.

Graveyards typically stood next to churches, although municipal grounds were not unknown, which were placed near a civic building such as a town hall or courthouse. With the population boom of the early 19th century, American cities such as New York and Philadelphia were among the first to actively remove entire graveyards to bucolic settings. Smaller communities followed suit, freeing valuable municipal property and devising greener areas for their dead. Rather than cramped, austere lots found within city limits, rolling fields dotted with lush trees and grandiose funerary monuments rapidly gained popularity. "Cemetery" comes from a Greek word meaning "place of sleep"--the neologistic moniker clearly indicates a shift from dwelling on the severity of death to spotlighting the peaceful, verdant atmosphere of a garden. In the last century, the low-maintenance lawn cemetery made its first appearance, where there are no tombstones at all, only markers set flush with the ground (I personally find these distressingly monotonous). Cremation, which was once strictly taboo as a means of treatment for the dead, has also become a standard option for many people.

Yalom covers a wide spectrum of burial practices from the myriad groups that made their way to America. The Mexican-Americans' zealous observance of the Day of the Dead (November 2) is counterbalanced with the African-American tradition of the Jazz Funeral in New Orleans. She discusses how the deaths' heads gave way to a cherub's winged countenance on tombstones in a further effort to "lighten" cemetery art. While I'd known the urn (especially one sculpted as draped in cloth) is a typical symbol of mourning, I hadn't realized the significance of the broken tree trunk, which stands for a life that has been cut short. I'd also not been aware that, among Jews, the simple act of placing stones on grave markers is a customary way of honoring their dead. The humble Amish burial grounds of Lancaster County are extolled alongside the Roman Catholic cemeteries of the greater Chicago area, which host thousands of elaborate crucifixes and statues of the Virgin Mary and the saints.

Even if you're not particularly prone to amble through cemeteries, this book sheds new light on American burial practices with great aplomb.