COTD Final Project

According to every book we have read and every documentary we have seen so far in this unit, the care of the dead ends after the burial or service. I beg to differ. For my final project for this unit, I went to three cemeteries to observe and document if care of the dead truly stopped after a body had been laid to rest within its final resting place or not. The first cemetery I visited was one dating back to the 18th and 19th century, the second one was a small cemetery, mostly with burial dates halting after the fifties and the third was a larger one where new plots are still being sold and used.

In the first cemetery I went to, the one dating from the 1700s-1800s, I honestly didn't realize was a cemetery. I've driven past it countless times and never even noticed it. The reason was apparent as soon as I stepped inside. Even though there was a small stone fence surrounding it, there were barely half a dozen headstones there. Of these headstones, only one was large enough for me to recognize right off the bat what it was. (The others, I realized their purpose after spotting the first.) The words etched in were so worn by weather and the elements faced over the years, the only things I could make out was the year of death was 1859 and the person was "aged 69 years". The headstone was perhaps a foot tall at most and half a foot find, a flat and smooth rectangle. Others were half its sized and usually curved at its top. My mother assured me that when she used to come to the cemetery, more headstones were there, but the area has been known to have theft issues for stone walls and fences. Considering that I had to kneel right in front of the barely legible headstone and squint to make out the words under the tree-cover, it wouldn't shock me if someone didn't even realize what they were taking from the cemetery or that they had even stepped foot in a cemetery. In terms of care of the dead past burial, there wasn't any evidence left for me to see. However, given the dates I have to go by, I would 'blame' that on either families dying out or moving too far away.

The second cemetery consisted of two parts. An older section where most of the graves were marked from the 1800s and a newer one where most were dated from prohibition onward, with multiple World War veterans. As a rule, even though the family that used to run the cemetery have all died, all the veterans still had a holder or plaque to designate their service and a place for an American flag. Most vets had American flags, fresh and clean, beside their graves, but no flowers. The only flowers I found in the newer side of the cemetery belonged to someone who had died in 2000 and there was a broken plastic cup as well as other minor litter around it. This was considerably absent from other, older graves but I considered it out of place and shocking as this grave was clearly the one that had been visited the most recently, judging by the flowers freshly dug into it. In the older section of the cemetery, I noticed the main problem seemed to be broken headstones. I realize that there probably isn't anything that could protect a headstone from the elements, however, nearly every other headstone that wasn't made of the material that looked like granite was cracked in half and haphazardly propped against its other half.

This and the litter problem I noticed much more abundantly at the larger cemetery I went to. Discarded candy wrappers, plastic, dirtied tissues and lighters. The latter I assumed belonged to the graves of avid, prideful smokers. In this cemetery, flowers and bushes were abundant, however, they were out of control and many, I noticed, covered over entire graves and perhaps even the headstones of strangers. Families now are required to pay a maintenance fee of sorts but after my visits, I doubt this money is being put to use. In this cemetery, headstones were often just left on the ground in pieces, decorative plants weren't controlled at all and had grown to the point where other families might not even be able to find their loved ones. After asking my mother about this particular cemetery, since we have family buried there, she noted that when she called inquiring their location once, she was told to wait a week before visiting so that the cemetery's workers could clean and mow that specific section - meaning that as a whole, the cemetery isn't maintained as often as that monthly or "lifetime" fee implies.

Care of the dead, it would seem, for our society, as a whole, tends to end a few years after the deceased has been buried. Veterans are only remembered on Memorial and Veterans' Day when flags were placed beside their grave. Children or young adults were some of the few who had flowers but past ten years after the burial, at least on my day of visitation, there was little or no evidence of the family being there. Is the care of our dead only relative to our grieving process? Is that too selfish of a way for us to think - only in this moment and to shove away this 'taboo' even instead of remembering the deceased like other cultures, especially in Mexico for Dia de los Muertos, do? At what point do the deceased ceased to become a significant or worthwhile aspect to our family?