Call me macabre, but among my favorite traversings are graveyards. My reasons are simple enough: a near-complete absence of vehicle traffic, foot traffic of mostly the solemn and respectful kind, and generally quiet surroundings that invite reduced blood pressure, heightened sensitivity to the natural world and internal contemplation of the inexhaustibly rich subject of finitude.
This means that walking graveyards (and cemeteries—often used interchangeably but with a slight difference, explained below*) is a common activity for Mary and me not only at home, but often on vacation travel as well.
No, graveyards are not quite as much a lure as hiking trails, parks, museums and brewpubs. But they are definitely worthy of attention when the usual extended wanderings of holiday travel both by car and foot suddenly present sites of historical interest, uncommon beauty, and a repose that seems to quietly beckon one to slow, to stop, to pay respects not only to the people beneath us now at rest, but also to the points of stillness within us, and which graveyards elicit like few other places in the world.
I got at this subject nearly a decade ago in a poem: “Walking the Graveyard,” On a just completed northeastern swing, I felt fortunate to come upon a family plot at Riverview Cemetery in coastal Cape Elizabeth, Maine, that brought back the familiar allure and had me, per usual, checking birth and death dates of the multiple members memorialized there.
Basic attention and simple math amidst headstones most always tell a tale worthy of reflection and speculation, and those of the Hill Family are particularly intriguing for both what they tell and don’t tell about its members interred there.
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Often, graveyards hosting the remains of multiple generations of family members have a patriarch-matriarch pair at the front or center, followed by the headstones of subsequent generations flaring out to the side and/or behind. The Hill Family plot is different for the eye-catching quality not of the eldest Hills interred there—Douglas and Genevieve, born in 1909 and 1911, respectively—but for the headstone of their son, Douglas, Jr., born to them in 1935. (He died at age 81 in 2017.)
Jr.’s headstone is notable both because it, rather than his father’s, leads off the entire row of the five family members currently interred there, and also because the style of his headstone is completely different than the others.
His is a polished black granite rather than the coarse gray granite of the others, and it also sports a likeness of him in the upper left corner that looks to be taken from a photograph, along with what appears to be a logo taken from the service station he owned. Those, along with his birth and death dates, are underscored by a short epitaph:
TO THOSE WHO KNEW HIM
HIS MEMORY NEVER GROWS OLD
Having never seen a logo adorning a headstone before, I automatically assumed not only Mr. Hill’s great pride in his business, but also its likely role as a community pillar of the automotive kind.
Sure enough, his obituary in the Portland Press Herald suggests as much:
“Doug was very active in the Boy Scouts as an assistant Scout Master. He loved his family, the Red Sox, camping, and NASCAR. The Hill’s Service Station, a family garage, was started in 1979 in South Portland and is still operating today.”
That was then, in 2017, when the station was taken over by his son, Richard, age 57 at the time, about whom it seems safe to say he had been well-trained by his dad to step into the role of owner-operator.
How can we assume this? From his own obituary, at age 60, just three years after his father’s death:
“Beloved Father, friend and mechanic to the community. Neighbors will thank him for his countless years of honest service as a highly skilled mechanic, and as the proud owner of Hill’s Service Station automotive shop. It was in Richard’s nature to help when ever he could.”
Hill’s Service Station has since closed, Richard’s two surviving daughters and a sibling sister appearing not to have assumed control.
Oh, one more thing. Richard, who for unknown reasons is not interred in the family plot with his parents and grandparents, once had a younger brother, Douglas III. He had lived from September 2, 1963 till June 1, 1964, just one day short of nine months.
And how do we know that?
Not from his obituary, the existence of which I was not able to find any evidence. Nor from his father’s or brother’s obituaries, which do not mention any pre-deceased family members other than their respective parents.
We know it only because Douglas III is the fifth member in residence at the family plot, his granite slab featuring just his name and dates of birth and death jammed in next to a tree at the end of the row.
No epitaph suggesting the ravage and grief of his passing, no image of his cherubic infant face.
Just a name and the most somber possible dates suggesting a human life once bloomed and was then curtailed, end of story.
It brings to mind just how tenuous the growth to adulthood has always been for children. Visit any old graveyard anywhere and there is a terrible unrarity to the number of infants and children lying beside other family members lucky to have survived childhood.
Historical research compiled by the Our World in Data website tells us that only in the very modern period spanning the past couple of centuries have the odds of children making it to adulthood dramatically risen.
“What is striking about the historical research is how similar child mortality rates were across a wide range of very different historical cultures: No matter where in the world a child was born, about half of them died.”
Richard Hill
Richard, just under 4 1/2 years old at the time of his brother’s death, presumably carried a few slender memories of him through the rest of his life.
Today, there are no doubt multiple reasons for why he does not lie beside his brother and parents in death. Might there be a story there?
I can’t tell you what that story is, but I will say this with certainty: There is always a story, everywhere.
Life and death are suffused and overflowing with stories, in approximately equal measure.
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Another story. Just to the right of Douglas Jr.’s grave is the headstone of his wife. Walking slowly to it after having had my eye caught by the glossy sheen photo and logo on Jr.’s headstone, I noted first her name (Kyung Ja), then the fact of her relatively modest headstone compared to her husband’s. And then her date of birth—1938, three years after her husband.
Doubting that Douglas Jr. would have met anyone named Kyung Ja in Cape Elizabeth, Maine in the early 1950s, I guessed he had been in the Korean War and stayed on afterwards, having met a young Korean woman and brought her home as his wife.
I wasn’t too far off. Finding his obituary, I discovered he had graduated high school in 1953, followed by vocational school and then shipping off to the Army “after the Korean War.” That would have put him there sometime mid-1950s, but what we do know for sure is he was still living there in 1960 with Kyung Ja, because their first son Richard was born in Seoul, South Korea in 1960.
Less than four years later, they had Douglas III, whom they lost within a year. With no obituaries for either him or his mother, who died at age 58 in 1997, we only know that Douglas Jr. was left a widower for the last 20 years of his life.
That doesn’t mean obituaries for mother and son don’t exist, but my fairly extensive (but by no means exhaustive) search haven’t turned up any, whereas obituaries for Douglas, Jr. and Richard were readily available with a cursory search.
In addition, Richard’s sister Nancy, birthdate unknown, was listed as a survivor in his obituary, but I was unable to find any information on her, either.
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Finally, I was able to glean no information other than the names on headstones of the parents, Douglas I and Genevieve, though in one of those quirky details that likely mortified the human being unfortunate enough to make such an all-too-human error, either the stonecutter or the person who supplied the stonecutter with Genevieve’s name spelled it “Geneive,” and Geneive she has remained since her passing in 1985.
Perhaps that is the perfect capper to the imperfect and incomplete picture we have been able to form of the Hill family after a half-hour’s pondering at their gravesite, followed by many more hours exploring the dusty, necessarily incomplete byways of the Internet to form some picture of their lives.
None of the Hills have inspired a 3,000-page biography spread over four volumes, which is the length of Robert Caro’s epic work on President Lyndon Johnson, with a fifth volume still to come.
And though it’s unlikely that the written record of any of their lives would provide enough material to fill such a work, that’s not to say that if any of them had a camera and recorder following them around the whole of their lives, a worthy biography could not have been written. In this most cursory investigation based on a haphazard wandering through a graveyard, we have been able to behold lives spanning centuries, continents and cultures, the death and seeming disappearance from history of an infant, a mother and other son dead before their time, a father widowed, the family business left rudderless and dead.
Every human life is a complex, often tangled and inscrutable affair. So many tales, triumphs and tragedies to be told, so few of them ever getting a telling.
Even 3,000 pages leave such gaping holes in the narrative of a subject’s life, such a plethora of unanswered questions and enduring mysteries as to make any biographer weep indeed at the prospect of ever attaining a complete picture. The final account of every life comes with but two certainties: It will remain forever incomplete, and it will end on some unknown day, the clock wound down, sometimes much too tragically soon, other times woefully late, but all of them with stories left untold.
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* This from Wikipedia and the “Who Knew?” Department, because I sure didn’t: “A graveyard is a burial ground within a churchyard. A cemetery is a burial ground for the dead that is usually located far from the church.”
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Hi Andrew,
So nice to see you recently in Santa Rosa.
I share your appreciation of graveyards and cemeteries. Beside absorbing the peaceful mood,… yes, reflecting on the lives of persons unknown to me, came naturally. As a 14 YO teen, I first wandered the local cemetary, seeking peace from the dour tension in my home. Walking the dog was a great cover.
Years later, while backpacking in Britain, I dragged my boyfriend out to Tintagel. My budding interest in Aurthurian lore fueled that search, which lead us to the oldest Christian church in Britian. Just a bit larger than a chapel, its churchyard included the cemetery where we walked among the very old hand carved headstones, covered with centuries of lichens. With difficulty and some luck, I read the names and dates of persons who lived and died before Columbus discovered “the New World.” Feelings of awe swelled as my perception opened wider to Time, Life in the Place we inhabit, History, these person’s Stories (and ultimately ours) that are now lost into the ether. Later that day, I napped at the edge of a steep cliff where seabirds nested. A fine day, seeking adventure and discovering more than external realities.
Beautiful memories, Marianne, made all the richer by them being drenched in lives and memories that speak to us from the graves of our ancestors, and all the places they have lived, roamed and died. Don’t get much more of a “universalist” feeling than that in this world! Thanks very much for giving us this glimpse into it all.
The Hornsby Bend Cemetery, some nine miles east of Austin, probably typifies many small country graveyards. It’s secluded, barely visible from FM 969. Tall oaks shade its rusty chain link gate. Its potholed dirt road, bordered on each side by wild undergrowth, keeps human traffic at bay. The pebbled parking lot has a maximum capacity of maybe six cars. Its grass, a feeble green with pockmarked blotches of burnt brown, thirsts for water. Low lying weeds wind their way through it with seemingly little fear of being uprooted. So, why in the world would I want to visit such a place? It’s quite simple really. I love baseball. Within it lies the remains of Rogers “Rajah” Hornsby, one of our national pastime’s greatest hitters. Surprisingly, his grave is remarkably unremarkable. It’s small with nothing to discern it from his anonymous neighbors except for a weather-worn Cardinal cap and a once white baseball now gray and yellow. While its modesty surprised me, I wasn’t disappointed. Then, as I walked back to the car, I noticed the cemetery was bisected by a chain link fence. I realized almost immediately that I was standing on the “white only” side. Hornsby Cemetery screams Jim Crow. I suppose I should have expected it. Texas was a Confederate state, and Hornsby’s racism was well-documented. Nevertheless, when I drove back along the potholed dirt road onto FM 969, I had no regrets. I just spent about thirty minutes walking through history.
Robert, do I have it right that this fence still literally separates black from white, with no signage suggesting context, reconciliation, at least symbolic remedies such as, oh, TEARING DOWN THAT DAMN FENCE? I can understand and even forgive the world’s Rogers Hornsbys growing up in the time and place that they did. It’s a much harder slog to extend that same understanding to those in these times who have every opportunity to know better but don’t care to try.
As far as I know, the fence(s) still exist. It’s an old, private cemetery dating as far back as 1836 when Texas won its independence from Mexico. To your point, I didn’t see any signs informing visitors about the graveyard’s segregated plots. Not only were the burial sites of the slaves separated from their white populace, but the Mexicans were segregated from both. I believe the cemetery is still active though most of the dates on tombstones I observed ranged from mid-19th to mid-20th century. Honestly, I wouldn’t take down the fence (acknowledge it, yes), but tearing it down would detract from its power to show us just how deep our racism ran and still runs today.
Yeah, I think you’re right about leaving the fence up as reminder, a kind of negative monument. But it’s shameful that whomever is in charge is not putting up some signage contextualizing the whole sad spectacle, using it a a teaching moment, getting on with the necessary business of reconciliation. Don’t know if I ever shared this with you, but Hungary faced a similar-but-not-identical challenge in addressing what to do with the Soviet-era statues forced into their town squares that glorified Communism in the Stalin era and beyond. They came up with a novel solution to ship them all to the Budapest’s outskirts as a kind of Museum/Unamusement Park, a reminder of what was and should never be again. (Though they’re skirting with autocracy again now, this time from inside, with Orban the Trump wannabe (or is it Trump the Orban wannabe?). Anyway, wrote about it here, and forgive me if I’ve sent it to you before…
http://andrewhidas.com/the-fall-of-the-mighty-paying-homage-to-history-at-budapests-memento-park/
Thirty years ago I drove an extra 50 miles on Kansas backroads to take my then-4 year old daughter to a cemetery in Norton, Kansas where members of my paternal family rest. We walked the grounds until we found family members (I had never before been there). Seeing my last name on the headstones, marked by the birth and death dates of relatives I hardly knew, and in some cases never met, profoundly touched me. The serenity and quiet of that warm Kansas summer day filled me with reflection on the wonders of being in the presence of ancestral gravesites with my young daughter who likely had no idea regarding the whats and whys of my effort to take her there and then my solemn, reflective behavior while standing there.
It’s that continuity thing, Jay. The long line of those who came before us, right up against your daughter standing next to you and the long line that will come after her. I think the awareness and appreciation of that grows so much more acute with age. We are just one small link in a long chain (or so we hope..). There’s both humility and deep comfort in that. The image of you in that graveyard makes me wonder if it’s even possible for me to find any of my grandparents’ gravesites. I have zero idea if they even have plots at all, and whether I could locate them. Food for thought—-and at least one more European vacation!
Yes, we are one small link in a long line of ancestors and, hopefully, future generations for whom we will be ancestors. I find it humbling and quite grounding. With aging comes an increasing appreciation for family and getting re-connected. This past year I have had the privilege of sharing time and memories with two cousins that I hadn’t seen in over 50 years. We are the three remaining members of the paternal side of my family.
Where I Iive (Maine), I find it interesting (and disturbing) that a number of the old graves for women list “wife of xxx” rather than their name as the identity.
I guess it makes sense, of course. If you start allowing women to have their names on their headstones, there’s no end to what they might start demanding.
Right, Blake—then they might start doing crazy things like running for president, and then where would we be??
I’m so glad you brought this up; it’s something I’ve observed in every cemetery I’ve ever been in, including Riverview. One of the long tentacles of the patriarchy that continue to show through today. Just this morning, musing on the stellar rollout of the Harris campaign, I suddenly reminded myself that those tentacles still run deeply through the national psyche, conscious or not, and could influence enough voters in a negative way to make the difference in November. Here’s hoping we’re past that now and can finally, after 248 years, allow ourselves a female president.