Caitlin Doughty's Blog, page 22
March 17, 2018
The Oldest Rite of Humanity and My Father’s Wake
Armed with questions, a copy of My Father’s Wake and her very own personal death date (note: exactly what a personal death date is and how you get one is revealed in the book), Lucy Coleman Talbot meets Kevin Toolis for breakfast on an unusually bright February morning in London.
Our chat begins with an ancient whisper, the Iliad, a poem written in 800 B.C.E. Kevin explains that the wake is a rite as old as time, one that is not confined to Irish shores. This ancient Greek poem ends with the death of Hector; whose body is brought back to the city of Troy on a four-wheeled wagon, followed by many of his friends ‘wailing and lamenting … as though he was on his road to death’. Once Hector’s body is laid out at home, the women of Troy surround him with their lament song. Hector’s wife Andromache, clasps her husband’s head and expresses her pain, sorrow and fears for the future. As grand and dramatic as this might sound, Kevin doesn’t want us to see this as anything other than ordinary and natural. The oldest rite of humanity.
The death whisper is what we know and feel as humans, a wisdom passed down through generations and learned by the very act of attending funerals (and if possible, wakes).
Whilst reading, My Father’s Wake, it struck me that these small touches; borrowing chairs from the local pub for his father, Sonny’s, wake, the mass preparation of ham sandwiches and strong tea, or locals helping with Sonny’s burial, carried the most meaning. They are the core of a community, but that not everyone has a community. People die alone every day and for those that don’t, an awkwardness often forms around their death, masked as a fear of intruding or imposing. Kevin says this is the ever-present problem with our ‘Western Death Machine’, a term he coined to capture the industrialisation of death and our death denying culture. He points out that community does not have to be the entire village of Dookinella (the birth, death and final resting place of Sonny) and it can exist through human connections, however small. This, he explains, is what the Irish wake taught him. From a young age attending wakes was normal and this meant life and death wasn’t separated. There is no fear of doing it wrong when you have had so much practice.
The notion that death must be private, a kind of ‘invite only’ event is a new unwritten rule courtesy of our Western Death Machine. When death moved out of the home it’s like the door got locked. Death ritual became less free, it became fixed to a 30-minute time slot and a telephone booking. Kevin’s book begins at Sonny’s deathbed, in the company of his family and friends and people Kevin had never met. The question, ‘What could these people learn from watching my father die?’ became the premise for My Father’s Wake. These people could learn to accept death by experiencing Sonny’s final moments, they could face death first hand, learn from it, and take it with them into the care of their own fathers, mothers and children.
Kevin Toolis as a child on a donkey. Haymaking in Dookinella, 1970s.
I found the death of Kevin’s brother Bernard to be the important turn in the story. He describes it with such poetry:
“Bernard’s death spilled into me. I felt drawn towards something I could not define: human sorrow, lives taken, grief, the mortal aftermath and the realm of the dead.”
It leads Kevin all over the world as he embarks (quite literally) on a death hunt, experiencing famine, war and plague first hand. He found the most complicated and dangerous situations, searching for some kind of meaning, facing death over and over in the most difficult of conditions. Because of this, My Father’s Wake offers not only insight into the wake, ‘the best guide to life you could ever have,’ but also the hardships and pain found in our global community.
Later, reflecting on my meeting with Kevin, I realised that a single thread had woven through our discussion that day: permission. This word embodies the boundaries that need to be broken down within our Western Death Machine. The restrictions we experience must be challenged; be they through legality, social acceptability, politics, the industrialisation of death, even our own denial or mortal fears.
We must grant ourselves and others permission.
Permission to grieve however we want to or need to:
We don’t need to be told that we are doing it right or that we are doing it wrong. There is no acceptable timescale or process and no point of saying “I’m 100% over this”. Grief is complicated and crippling, like the strong rip current off the shores of Dookinella it can be unpredictable and all consuming.
Permission to inhabit space and ask for help when we need it:
For so many death is an isolating experience. Watching someone die in front of you can be harrowing, but it can also be healing and the same goes for facing our own end. We need to know that whatever the circumstances we can reach out and in turn, others need to know they can reach out to us. This can be the smallest of actions: a phone call, a cup of tea, some food, some help with the housework, stopping in the street, a hand shake, some eye contact, maybe even a “sorry for your trouble”.
Permission to die or bury our dead our own way:
In the clutches of death it can feel like there are no options, and sometimes we find there aren’t any. We don’t all have access to unlimited funds or a village community to call upon. Death can be hard on a practical level. Remember, the simplest of acts can be powerful, like Kevin’s sisters breaking the traditional gendered role of pall bearer and opting to carrying their father’s coffin.
Permission to talk about death and confront our own mortality through death:
At Sonny Toolis’ wake Kevin listens to others share stories of deaths that have deeply affected them. The wake serves a function for the community of Dookinella, it creates a space to reflect, open up and contemplate the fragility of life. Can we permit these conversations in our everyday lives? Are we guilty of uncomfortably brushing off an intimate tale of death because it feels morbid or not the right time? How long do people carry stories they desperately need to share, but can’t find the place to? The Irish wake permits life and death to co-exist, at Sonny’s wake his grandchildren play at the foot of his coffin. This is not macabre or irresponsible, this is allowing death to be part of life.
Permission to “take the weight”:
At the close of our chat, Kevin told me that the key is not being afraid to “take the weight”. To physically feel the weight of your dead as they are lowered into the ground is a great privilege, an intimate moment that connects you to your own mortality in a way impossible to explain verbally. It can be the most emotional and affirming of experiences. For you, taking the weight may not be possible, but you can find other ways to make this connection. It might be the washing and wrapping your dead in a shroud, it might be an open casket, it might be a visit to the hospital mortuary, or it might be saying “I want to bring his/her body home” before the funeral. As the Western Death Machine continues to grind on, permit yourself the honour of caring for your own dead.
Read Kevin’s book for a peek into the rites and rituals of an ancient past, My Father’s Wake teaches us that death does not need to be reinvented, we don’t need to find new ways… we need to uncover and rediscover the old ways.
By Lucy Coleman Talbot
Personal Death Date: 2066*
*without bravely factoring in all those cigarettes and all that booze.
Lucy Coleman Talbot is the co-founder of Death and the Maiden, author of Little Book of Maudism and volunteer at the Crossbones Graveyard, London. She is currently on an MPhil/PhD studentship examining Crossbones at the University of Winchester. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
If you enjoyed this piece, please consider supporting our work. Your contribution goes directly toward running The Order, including resources, research, paying our writers and staff, and funding more frequent content. We’d love to keep pushing the funerary envelope in 2018. Visit our Support Us page, for a variety of easy ways to contribute.
March 16, 2018
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March 1, 2018
Caring For a Community of the Dead
Shrouded by trees and overgrown foliage, Bayside Cemetery is barely visible from the fence that surrounds this small Jewish burial ground in Ozone Park, Queens. New Yorkers can glimpse its granite tombs and mausoleums from the A train as it rumbles past on the elevated tracks, yet few visitors walk its weedy paths. While that seclusion and reclamation by nature can make it feel like a peaceful urban escape, those same elements have led to major vandalism and desecration over recent decades. Tombs have been toppled, coffins shattered and skeletons exposed, with one mausoleum even set on fire.
I first visited Bayside Cemetery in 2012, and was struck by the beautiful metal fences and old ceramic photographs on the headstones, and also the mausoleum doors replaced with rotting plywood, and the large number of tombstones that had been knocked over. It felt like a place New York City had forgotten. But I soon found there was a very dedicated person giving his weekends to its care. I connected with Anthony Pisciotta after I shared my photographs on Flickr, and we subsequently collaborated on a series of tours he led for Atlas Obscura between 2012 and 2016, when I was then the senior editor for the travel site. Those who joined (including for a tour held just days following Hurricane Sandy), always caught Pisciotta’s contagious enthusiasm for the place, where he seemed to know a story behind every grave.
“I like history and I like working with my hands, so it’s a great thing for me, because I can do both,” said Anthony Pisciotta, whose day job is with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA)’s Bridges and Tunnels. Established in the 1860s, Bayside has around 35,000 burials, representing the vibrant diversity of over a century of New York City Jewish life, from religious leaders to Civil War veterans to an Ostrich feather seller who died on the Titanic. The Victorian-style monuments are decorated with as many urns and angels as Stars of David and Cohen hands, and stained glass and mosaic floors adorn many tombs. It sits on a stretch of land with three cemeteries, bordered by Acacia on its east and Mokom Sholom on the west; you know you’ve reached Bayside when you’re walking in the shadows cast by the spindly trees that have been left to grow wild.
Pisciotta first noticed Bayside in the early 1990s when he drove a delivery truck for a food distributor, and often passed by on the adjacent Pitkin Avenue. “It was really overgrown back then, and it caught my eye, that a cemetery could be that overgrown and that run down,” he said. In 2003, he caught a news report around about a group of Mormons who were volunteering to clean the place, so he went out to help. Then in 2011, when he was working his new job for Bridges and Tunnels, he again passed by, and remarked that it had improved. He had a long weekend for the July 4th holiday, and decided to return with his son and some gardening tools.
“I picked this one plot that was way in the back because there were some children there who had died really young,” he said. “So we started cleaning it, and my son wandered off, maybe a couple of hundred feet away from us, where there was a mausoleum. He comes back to me and he says, ‘Dad, you’re not going to believe this but it’s open, this mausoleum.’ And you could see inside of it, and you could see the skeletons and everything.”
The broken coffins, and the exposed bones, seemed like they had been that way for a while. “I was pretty upset about what I’d seen, because I didn’t think that that should be like that,” he said. “And I started making some phone calls to the city, to anybody I thought might be able to help.”
Since the cemetery is managed by a synagogue and not the state, he found that getting someone to pay attention was difficult. “I really didn’t want to call the media because I felt they would turn it into like a big creepy, scary story, but I felt that the ends justified the means,” he explained. “I got interviewed by two different news crews, and after that I said to my wife, ‘I could be one of the people who complains, or I could be somebody that’s going to actually do something to try to change the situation.’ So I started going out there doing work, cleaning up different plots. And it progressed until I started to repair stones that had been pushed over.”
So although he is not Jewish, and has no relatives at Bayside, he began devoting his free time to the cemetery’s improvement. He built a piece of equipment designed to lift and reset stones, soldered broken iron gates, carefully reconstructed an angel that marked a child’s grave, and connected with other people who wanted to restore dignity to this place. A man whose father was buried there gave some funding to seal the open mausoleums to discourage further damage and theft. And Pisciotta used his passion for research and history to delve into the identities of the interred, scouring old New York Times newspapers, the New York Public Library, the Municipal Archives, and sharing information with organizations like the Shapell Roster, a digital archive of Jewish people who fought in the Civil War. All these fragments of information filled in gaps in the sparse synagogue records. It also led to previously unmarked veterans’ graves receiving their honors, such as Irving Aron, a marine killed in Nicaragua in 1930 whose monument was blank after his metal marker was stolen.
Despite Pisciotta’s work and that of other volunteers and groups like the Community Association for Jewish At-Risk Cemeteries (CAJAC), Bayside is again in a decline. “The congregation cut off the cleaning of the cemetery since last April, so it’s back to where it was,” he said. Due to the return of the overgrowth, and the continuous dumping of trash on the grounds, it’s currently too dangerous to do restoration. However, he still attends to graves that he knows are regularly visited by families, so they can safely visit and see their loved ones’ names. He hopes that a change in management may lead to better care of the cemetery, but for now it’s a matter of what he calls “triage” — making small efforts to maintain it as welcoming as possible for those who come to remember and mourn. “I’m not going to give up on the place, and I’m going to continue to try to get people interested in it, and try to shake the tree,” he said.
Bayside is not unique, as around the world there are cemeteries that, for a variety of reasons, have been left to deteriorate. Pisciotta noted that anyone who takes an interest in their local burial grounds can contribute to their care.“Not everybody has to work with their hands, either,” he stated. “There are a lot of cemeteries that need help with getting their data online so that researchers can find it. You can get involved in going out and photographing the cemeteries so they can be uploaded online where people can see it.” As he affirmed, “There’s always room for people to help.”
All photographs by the author.
Allison C. Meier is a Brooklyn-based writer focused on history and visual culture. Previously, she was a staff writer at Hyperallergic and senior editor at Atlas Obscura. She moonlights as a cemetery tour guide.
If you enjoyed this piece, please consider supporting our work. Your contribution goes directly toward running The Order, including resources, research, paying our writers and staff, and funding more frequent content. We’d love to keep pushing the funerary envelope in 2018. Visit our Support Us page, for a variety of easy ways to contribute.
February 26, 2018
Baltimore’s Mount Auburn Cemetery: Autonomously African & Free from White Control
Did you read the historical marker in the opening picture? Go back and read it, carefully and completely. Let the words oldest cemetery for African Americans…served the community…influential in the freedom movement of the 19th century…here rests former slaves and thousands of African American families…just wash over you.
Mount Auburn Cemetery was all of this. It stands, as the marker so clearly illustrates, as a site of memory for the struggle and progress of African Americans within a hostile white supremacist society that normalized enslavement and the dehumanization of Black bodies. As the historical marker states, it was founded by the oldest Black United Methodist Church in Baltimore making Mount Auburn an autonomous space for Blacks to receive a proper and decent burial at a time when those of African descent were legally labeled the property of white merchants and planters.
As beautifully powerful as is the placard, it does not even begin to tell the full origin story of the historical treasure trove. The history of Mount Auburn did not start in 1872. And what’s more is that it would not be until the Trustee Board meeting of June 30, 1903 before it would be officially renamed Mount Auburn Cemetery. In fact, what is unbeknownst to many is that the cemetery (and its current location) is the last phase of a burial ground that was first established in Baltimore in 1807 – the culmination of three early grave yards established by Sharp Street Memorial United Methodist Church. The African Burying Ground (the first phase) was established in what was then Baltimore county. The city later expanded to include the cemetery making its geographical location South Baltimore. By 1839, the African Burying Ground filled up and new land, again outside the city limits, was purchased. Belair Burial Ground, as it was now called, interred people until 1870 when a major expansion plan was underway to again disinter everyone from Belair Burial Ground to the new Sharp Street Cemetery located in South Baltimore, where it started. All of this, its founding and geographical moves around Baltimore, directly paralleled the experience of Black people in Baltimore.
The African Burying Ground was founded as the simultaneous call for freedom and humanity as well as a call for actualized burial rights for Black people and people of color. Black men and women lived enslaved and comprehensively oppressed but fought to establish an autonomous piece of land that would carry and display Black humanity and Black freedom in the afterlife. When the seven trustees of the African Methodist Church (now Sharp Street Memorial United Methodist Church) took up this charge only five years after financing a brick and mortar church it was important they established a grave yard that would be 1) designated for Black decedents and decedents of colour; and 2) remain Black-owned. This is clearly illustrated by the language of the June 1807 deed between Francis Hollingsworth (the white merchant and devout Methodist from whom the land was purchased) where it plainly stated that the land was to “serve as a burying ground for the Africans or people of colour of the precincts and the city of belonging to and in communion with the society of Christians.” What’s more, is that when those seven trustees cease to no longer serve in the capacity, the burial ground was not to revert back to the umbrella United Methodist Church (read white) but was to be passed down to the next set of trustees. This may sound like common sense but during an era of institutionalized slavery where to be Black and a slave were legally synonymous, land owned by Blacks where funerals of all those of African descent were protected, normalized, and respected and up-to-date burial and death records were kept (this early in the nineteenth century) was not to be assumed but met with shock!
In 1664, only 30 years after the English settled in what they called Maryland, an Act Concerning Negroes & Other Slaves adopted that all Black persons living, coming to, and born in Maryland were slaves Durante Vita (Latin for “during life”). Compounded with the fact that your life was now not your own, the 1701 Act for the Establishment of Religious Worship solidified that every enslaved Black woman, man, and child met death as a slave. The act legalized the omission of “Negroes and Mulatoes” from county government burial registers using racism to deny blacks and people of color Christian freedom. In this way, race was used to construct a thick border privileging whites to burial rights while denying them to Blacks and people of colour.
Then, as it is now, burial’s the ceremonial act of sending the decedent to the afterlife. Through song, dance, food, and remembering the life of the deceased, the funeral’s the bridge between life and the afterlife. And for enslaved Blacks of the colonial era, this bridge was the walkway to FREEDOM! What must be made clear, but is often overlooked, is that funerals and obsequies are about self-actualized liberty.
The African Burying Ground became the realized part of that freedom – it was a 2 ¼ acres tangible geographical location where black life mattered. Prior to its founding in 1807, Marylanders of African descent were largely buried in the Potter’s Fields, so-called “slave cemeteries” or one of three Catholic grave yards. Potter’s Fields, a grave yard where the unclaimed dead were interred four to a lot, was established in Baltimore in or around 1796.
Decedents were numbered, unprotected, and forgotten. With the threat of body snatchers spurred by the need for cadavers at local medical colleges, the dead were never really laid to rest in Potter’s Fields. Slave cemeteries – separated patches on slaveholders’ land meant to denote racial and social otherness where enslaved persons were buried in bondage – was a complete affront to freedom. It is important to understand that the freedom through death enslaved Blacks sought was as real to them as the life of slavery and oppression they lived. Records and scholars attested that bond women and men believed death to symbolize freedom. How then could freedom from enslavement happen when a body was buried on slave land?
The body may have been buried on slaveholders’ land but according to African American death ideology (the ideas that enslaved Africans expressed about the belief in their soul’s freedom in the afterlife) the conclusion is clear – the soul was set free at death. In her most recent work, The Price for Their Pound of Flesh, Daina Berry discussed the soul in terms of the most fiercely protected, coveted secret and unquantifiable value of African Americans that slaveholders could never take. These “soul values” she said developed during the adolescent and young adult years through “inner spiritual centering that facilitated survival [and] were reinforced by loved ones.” Berry described “soul values” as “a spirit, a voice, a vision, a premonition, a sermon, an ancestor, (a) God”. It was this high value placed on the soul that continued the importance of burial and burial place for African Americans and their descendants.
Once established, the African Burying Ground was a safe haven for enslaved and free Blacks. In 1818, 105 Black persons were recorded buried in Baltimore. To put this in context, 574 Black people died that year and of that number: 211 went to Potter’s Fields East and 184 went to Potter’s Field’s West while only 20 were buried in the three Catholic grave yards, 2 in the two Baptist church grave yards, and 1 in the Episcopalian grave yard. What this means is that 105 or nearly 30% of souls were saved from the Potter’s Fields and that outside of the African Burying Ground, there was not a real option for Black people to have a proper burial.
Belair Burial Ground, the second phase, was active from 1839 until 1878 when the Baltimore City Street Commissioners chose to extend Patterson Park to North Avenue. At this point, Sharp Street Church decided to disinter and reinter all 475 bodies across northern Baltimore county lines down to the southern half of Baltimore city to an 8-acre burial plot deeded seven years earlier in December 1871. This was a magnanimous undertaking [pun intended] that with twenty hired hands took the church three full months and cost $5,285.97 – roughly $131,000 in today’s currency! The move put what was now called Sharp Street Cemetery back in south Baltimore for good.
Spearheading the move from start to finish was perhaps the church’s Christian duty and some may even argue that since it was no fault of the lot holders, the responsibility indeed befell Sharp Street Church to again lay each soul to rest. But what must be pointed out is the notion of self-help and racial uplift that was clearly at the helm. Preached as a philosophy by easily the most influential African American of the late 19th/early 20th century, Booker T. Washington, self-help became a mantra after the Freedmen’s Bureau went bankrupt and the federal government pulled out the south leaving former slaveholders in charge of law and policy and Black folks to, once again, fend for themselves. Self-help was the idea that since help was not coming, Black folks must help themselves.
Following the Reconstruction Era (1865-1877) was a time of legalized national oppression and subjugation which normalized customs that discriminated and subjugated African Americans in their day-to-day lives. Many cemeteries had a “Black section” or enforced de facto policies that only welcomed white lot holders. Sharp Street Cemetery, then, developed as a 26-acre geographical space where African Americans were not just welcomed but venerated post mortem. Sections of the cemetery were named after well-known Baltimore undertakers such as William Dungee, John Toadvin, and Hercules Ross. Walkways between each section were named after prominent African Americans – Brown Avenue for Rev. Benjamin Brown, Sr. the first African American preacher of Sharp Street Church and first preacher seated in the law-making body of Methodism in the history of the Methodist Episcopal Church; and Young Avenue for Jacob Young, African American preacher who petitioned the right to form the Washington Conference, first session for the Colored Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church.
In 1904, a year after the cemetery was named Mount Auburn Cemetery, church trustees ran monthly ads in the Afro American newspaper advertising their newly renovated cemetery as “one of the most beautiful cemeteries in the state that our people have access to [emphasis added]”. This was a direct attack against Jim Crow segregation. The inclusion of the phrase “our people” let African American know that they are fully welcome to a perpetually cared, first-rate cemetery with a serene river view while it simultaneously informed white Americans that Black folks did not need (or want) their “Black sections” and were unbothered by their whites only covenants.
Today, as 34-acre Mount Auburn Cemetery located back in south Baltimore, the cemetery proudly stands as a living memorial of Black history. And not just symbolically speaking. No. Deep under its surface within the soil for tomorrow’s life is 211 year-old Black Baltimore history. From enslaved Africans to the Who’s Who of Baltimore are buried within its keep – Baltimore’s first independently licensed Black female mortician (Katie Williams), Maryland’s first Black female licensed to practice medicine (Dr. Nellie Young) and founder of the Afro-American newspaper (John Murphy) to name a few. Mount Auburn Cemetery is also the keeper of national heroes, such as Joseph Gans, first African American Light-Weight boxing champion as well as those with national acclaim such as Bishop Edgar A. Love, founder of Omega Psi Phi Fraternity, Inc.
Mount Auburn Cemetery is a historical landmark two times over – in 1986 designated a Baltimore City Landmark and in 2001 entered in the National Register of 2001. It stands as a testament to a fight won for burial rights for Africans and people of colour. It illustrates the prominence of Black history and heritage on which Baltimore was built.
Dr. Kami Fletcher is an Assistant Professor of African American History at Delaware State University. Her research centers on African American burial grounds, late 19th/early 20th century Black male and female undertakers, and African American death ideology. She is the author of “Real Business: Maryland’s First Black Cemetery Journey’s into the Enterprise of Death, 1807-1920”. Look out for her forthcoming volumes: 1) the co-edited Till Death Do Us Part: American Ethnic Cemeteries as Borders Uncrossed which examines the internal and/or external drives among ethnic, religious, and racial groups to separate their dead, under contract with University of Mississippi Press; and 2) the co-edited Southern Cemeteries, Imprints of Southern Culture which demonstrates the interactions between southern culture and the dead – especially examining the fluid, ever changing demands the living placed on the dead with careful attention to the growing debate over whether Confederate monuments should remain in public cemeteries.
Please note: This piece is based on an essay to be published as part of a forthcoming anthology. See Kami Fletcher. “ ‘Negroes and Mulatoes Excepted”: How Early Maryland Law, Protected Burial Borders, and Slave Cemeteries Shaped Burial Rights for Blacks.” In Til Death Do Us Part: American Ethnic Cemeteries as Borders Uncrossed Edited by Kami Fletcher and Allan Amanik by University Press of Mississippi (2019 projected date).
Footnotes:
[1] “Slave cemeteries” – every plantation that held African/African Americans captive did not set aside land for “slave cemeteries.” Some used headstones to serve as a demarcation line while others simply did not have one at all leaving burial and all obsequies to the slave community. Regardless, research shows that enslaved women and men inverted the lens of death and used what Diane Jones called the “African American landscape” to bury loved ones far away from slaveholders and close to slave quarters and/or near edges of the property (out of sight) for spiritual protection from the slaveholders. See: Diane Jones, “The City of the Dead: The Place of Cultural Identity and Environmental Sustainability in the African-American Cemetery,” Landscape Journal 30 (2011). || Catholic cemeteries – Between 1793 and 1800, forty-three “free mulattos,” “children of color,” “French negroes,” negroes,” “negro slaves,” and “free negroes” were buried in St. John’s, St. Peter’s or St. Patrick’s burying grounds in Baltimore, MD.
[2] “Accused of Body Snatching,” Baltimore Sun, February 19, 1898.
If you enjoyed this piece, please consider supporting our work. Your contribution goes directly toward running The Order, including resources, research, paying our writers and staff, and funding more frequent content. We’d love to keep pushing the funerary envelope in 2018. Visit our Support Us page, for a variety of easy ways to contribute.
Baltimore’s Mount Auburn Cemetery: Autonomously African & Free from White Control
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