I’ve always liked cemeteries. Admittedly, they may not be ecologically-sustainable enough for the coming centuries of growing population and shrinking landmasses, but the cemeteries we do have provide a snapshot of history that we do well to bear in mind. As largely-green open spaces, they can provide the spiritual nourishment of a city park, except with the watchful eyes of the past looking over our shoulders.
Cemeteries reveal the cultures that made them. They reveal what those cultures value, what histories they want to write, what they want to remember. The Forest Home Cemetery near where I grew up was the resting spot for the remains of Chicago’s undesireds in the late 19th century, including Druids, Roma, the Haymarket massacre victims, and even Emma Goldman – people who today are more esteemed than the relative nobodies who made it into the “good” cemeteries downtown.
And so it comes as little surprise that similar historical reconsiderations are happening in Portland, surrounding the Lone Fir Cemetery that sits half a block away from a house I lived in and is where our cat got lost for one fretful night.
Street Roots exposes the conversation in swing about the ways burial plots have been treated – namely, the way the burial sites of persons suffering mental illness were paved over and the way today’s mental health advocates are campaigning for a memorial for those buried there. Lone Fir was the final resting place for the bodies of both Chinese workers and inhabitants of the local “Insane Hospital,” both of which were buried separately from the higher status individuals of pioneer families.
What is the concept behind distinct burial areas, dependent on social status? Is the concern that people’s souls will mingle if their corpses are too close together – and that’s a bad thing? Or are the bereaved worried that they will have to mourn their beloved next to persons unlike themselves, people “like them?”
Or does the city simply not want to remember everyone equally? We write our histories not only in books, but in the very spaces we create as cities and neighborhoods and congregations. May we strengthen ourselves for the tough work of community-building, in body, in spirit, and in memory.
