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Taphophilia (dot) Com...
A repository of morbid curiosities:
Thanatology and Taphophile Issues, Cemetery,
Funeral Industry and Death Related News.
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Announcements
Men of Mortuaries Calendar
To purchase your 2008 calendar, learn more about the KAMMCARES Foundation, or to be featured in the 2009 calendar, please visit Men of Mortuaries.
Epitaphs: The Magazine for Cemetery Lovers By Cemetery Lovers
For information regarding subscriptions, single issues, submission guidelines, deadlines, classifieds or advertising for future issues, please visit The Cemetery Club.
Guardians of the Soul: Angels and Innocents, Mourners and Saints, Indiana's remarkable cemetery sculpture
with photography by John Bower and foreword by Claude Cookman is now
available. Please visit
Studio Indiana for more information.
West Springfield Massachusetts: Stories Carved in Stone by Rusty Clark features information on early New England gravestone carvers with more than two hundred photos and illustrations. Please visit the Dog Pond Press website.
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Editorial: Of grave concern |
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Written by DeadGirl
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Friday, 18 June 2004 |
By Julia Spitz
June 17, 2004
It helps to be an ex-president if you want the streets of Washington closed on your behalf, but even ordinary souls command our respect when a hearse is involved.
Just ask Richard Hall, who tools around Framingham in his Boot Hill Express.
"When they see me coming, they give me a lot of leeway," Hall said of drivers who share the road with the 1972 black wagon he picked up from a South Carolina funeral home. "Sometimes people behind me put their lights on."
The 50-year-old wears a frayed black top hat when he's behind the wheel and keeps a coffin in the back.
"It's the casket I'm going to be buried in," Hall said yesterday. "It'll last 200 years."
Hall has wanted to drive a hearse since he was a kid, he said. "They're artwork on wheels."
Our departed get to ride in style and their permanent home is often some of the nicest real estate in town.
Mount Auburn Cemetery in Watertown is lush. Sleepy Hollow in Concord is a historical tour. Edgell Grove in Framingham is both, on a smaller scale. The names found there are the same ones that adorn street signs and schools throughout town.
There are several Hemenway plots near the Kendalls, Butterworths and Comer Belknap, 1844-1923, and his wife, Rebecca J. Hosmer, 1846-1936, but you can learn a lot more than lifespans from cemetery stones. The Clarks listed their relationships -- wife, husband, mother, brother -- and oftentimes the names are accompanied by a motto.
"Precious memories spring from the dust" is inscribed on the headstone of "husband" Newell Clark, March 19, 1816-May 18, 1879.
John Milton's words, "They also serve who only stand and wait," are immortalized for the Rev. James A. Kendall, who lived from 1803 to 1884.
The most puzzling inscription is just below a Grecian goddess on a monument for Sarah E. White, founding regent of the Framingham chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, and her husband, Elisha White, M.D. A surgeon who served in the Civil War with the 37th Regiment Massachusetts Volunteers, his life is memorialized by "He never saw death."
How could any doctor not have seen death, let alone one who served near battlefields without benefit of antibiotics or even clean water? Does it have some other meaning, and if so, what?
Oftentimes there's no one left who can answer those kinds of questions, said Kevin Devlin, the cemetery's superintendent who was mowing nearby on Tuesday morning.
But working in the thick of such history is a pleasure for Devlin.
"I like everything about my job, keeping the place up, making families feel better," he said.
Many others share his sentiments. Barbara and Michael Minnehan of Milford have devoted much of the past six years to restoring the predominantly Irish Old St. Mary's Cemetery off Rte. 85, which they said was abandoned by the diocese seven decades earlier.
"The majority of those buried there were the ones who came during the potato famines of 1845-50," Barbara said.
Thanks to the work of their organization, the Friends of Old St. Mary's Cemetery, almost 1,000 headstones have been upgraded, the roadway has been paved and the grass is cut every month.
While the motivation was to honor their ancestors, as Barbara said, "None of what we have today would be possible without these people," the group's efforts have had a ripple effect. Groups in Bellingham, Lowell and Waltham, where a section of Calvary Cemetery contains the unmarked graves of Irish babies moved in the early 1900s due to a construction project, have launched projects to restore final resting places, she said.
The history is important, said Michael Minnehan.
"For anyone doing genealogy, this is a godsend," he said of the Milford headstones, which often include where in Ireland the person came from. But again there are questions left unanswered.
"You see a father with five children and they all died within a few days of one another and you think, 'What in the world happened?'" he said.
While we like our loved ones to have a good spot for their eternal rest, there's no one answer on what constitutes a fitting tribute.
ABC anchor Peter Jennings commented several times during the Washington service for former President Ronald Reagan that Americans' appetite for pageantry surprised people in other countries. A reader from Sherborn who called the newspaper's Speak Out line to say Holliston signs in memory of those killed in Iraq was "a disgrace" probably falls in the pomp camp. But many of us like our tributes simple.
Those cardboard signs, with the person's name, age, home state or country (including Spain, Bulgaria and Italy) and a flag took my breath away when I drove through town shortly after Memorial Day. The bare facts were painfully eloquent. Each life had equal value.
And that's the point of the rituals and traditions we save for death.
As a plaque on the wall of Devlin's office at Edgell Grove eloquently concludes, "Every life is worth loving and remembering -- always."
http://www.metrowestdailynews.com/columnists/view.bg?articleid=70958 |
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Taphophilia?
taphophilia (taf′ō-fil′ē-ă)
ORIGIN:
From the Greek words taphos, meaning "tomb" or "sepulcher" and philia, meaning "attraction or affinity to something, in particular the love or obsession with something"
DEFINITION: 1. An excessive interest in graves and cemeteries. 2. A love or fondness for funerals, graves, and cemeteries. 3. In psychiatry, a morbid attraction to graves and cemeteries
Quote Repository
“Men fear death as children fear to go in the dark; and as that natural fear in children is increased with tales, so is the other.” Francis Bacon
Shirtless and Sculpted
The Men of Mortuaries 2008 Calendar is now available! All sale proceeds benefit KAMMCARES, a breast cancer foundation.
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