|
Welcome
Taphophilia (dot) Com...
A repository of morbid curiosities:
Thanatology and Taphophile Issues, Cemetery,
Funeral Industry and Death Related News.
A Taphophilia Thank You...
Taphophilia (dot) Com would not be possible without the knowledge, experience and talent of DarkestWeb. From its conception and early development, DarkestWeb was faced with many challenges; from inspiring and motivating, to providing guidance and direction. The continued dedication and support has produced results greater than ever expected, and for this, I owe a huge debt of gratitude.
Announcements
Graveyards of Chicago:
The People, History, Art, and Lore of Cook County Cemeteries
By Matt Hucke And Ursula Bielski. Discover a Chicago That Exists Just Beneath the Surface - About Six Feet Under! Take a tour of Chicago's permanent residents! Please visit the Lake Claremont Press website to purchase your copy of Graveyards of Chicago today!
Green-Wood Cemetery Arcadia Publishing announces the release of Alexandra Mosca's historic account of one of New York's most famous cemeteries. Aracdia Publishing's Images of America series has an extensive catalog of many cemetery publications! Please visit Arcadia Publishing to purchase your copy of Green-Wood Cemetery and to browse other available titles!
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.
|
|
Ex-nun pens poems about childhood in the cemetery house |
|
|
|
|
Written by DeadGirl
|
|
Sunday, 30 April 2006 |
TORONTO (CP) - She grew up the gravedigger's daughter.
While surrounded by tombstones, coffins and funerals, Mary Ann Mulhern insists, though, that a childhood living in the house adjacent to the Holy Angels Cemetery in St. Thomas, Ont., was not filled with melancholy or even a sense of mortality.
That came later, when her best friend was killed in an auto accident on her way to university. The shock and grief Mulhern felt when death hit home in such a personal way propelled her into a convent for eight years, a failed experiment that taught her the true meaning of loneliness and depression.
But today in conversation, the Windsor, Ont., resident is surprisingly quick to laugh. And those earlier experiences did bring out the poet in her. A first collection about the nunnery years - 2003's The Red Dress - is in its second printing (by Black Moss Press) and this week marks the official launch of a second book of poems, Touch the Dead, recalling that childhood in the cemetery house.
"Margaret Atwood in her book Negotiating With the Dead says that actually writing is a way that people deal with their fear of mortality," Mulhern notes. "She thinks the voice continues beyond other art forms, because it's storytelling."
The Touch the Dead title comes from one poetic memory of her Irish Catholic mother:
"In the funeral home
my mother kneels before a coffin
kisses her friend
says you should touch the dead
they are not lost to love."
Yet she recalls nothing morbid or even abnormal about being a kid whose playground was a graveyard.
"In school there was more fear put upon me. I had never heard of hell or fire or damnation until I went to school and the nuns really drove this home. My parents never talked about that."
Mulhern says that as the caretaker of the graveyard, her deeply religious immigrant father felt that it was more than a job, that his was a work of mercy.
"People wanted him to care for their dead, they wanted the grass kept, they wanted the markers and the monuments maintained," she recalls.
"That gave them solace."
Mulhern says our culture is so ambivalent about death.
"People will say to an undertaker 'I want to remember her the way she was.' What they're saying is 'I don't want to see her dead. I'm afraid of death."'
"And at the same time people will search ruins, like 9-11, people searched for their (loved ones), and if a child is missing the parents will search. They want to know, and they want the body back. So we fear seeing it and we also fear not seeing it."
The mood of the poems ranges from the darkly sorrowful to the outright macabre. She describes the unfinished tombstones her father sold at the house, waiting for names to be inscribed, or the time her brother found an old tombstone with the same name as his on it. And there was one occasion when he dared to sneak a peek inside an old woman's coffin:
"Huge hands clutch dark beads
curve like claws
ready to reach out
snatch a bad little boy
pull him inside
shut the lid"
The sense of isolation of the convent experience from the late 1960s to early '70s proved to be more of a shock than life in the cemetery house. The nuns were not allowed friendship. She was even scolded once for holding hands with her visiting brother.
"I glimpse life through narrow bars," she writes. "Pillars of religion."
But despite the cloistered life, she says, the shockwaves of the 1960s social and sexual revolution outside managed to infiltrate the convent walls and eventually she had to leave the order.
Mulhern suggests that the Roman Catholic Church, under siege on so many fronts, has lost its credibility and must change drastically to survive. She notes the sexual abuse shocks, refusals to ordain women and to end priestly celibacy and the practice of appointing bishops based primarily on their allegiance to Rome. To say nothing of the revisionism prompted by the likes of The Da Vinci Code in which the Vatican's version of biblical history is viewed by some to be at odds with historical evidence.
"We need a miracle and that miracle would be a Pope John XXIV," she says, quoting the liberal reform theologian Hans Kung. "I mean a pope that goes into Africa and tells people NOT to use condoms?"
Mulhern says her next literary project may look at the way women have been portrayed down through history .
"I'd like to do something on wives, witches, virgins and whores."
http://www.brandonsun.com/story.php?story_id=24637 |
|
