10 minute read
Memento Mori in Action
A MOTHER & DAUGHTER BOND OVER CLEANING OLD HEADSTONES, WHILE DISPELLING CEMETERY STIGMA
BY ELISA GONZALES VERDIPHOTOGRAPHY BY BRITTANY GRIMESART EMBELLISHMENTS BY LADY SARA RICHARD
Talking about death won’t kill you,” Lady Sara Richard says with a smile. Perhaps not, but it’s certainly not comfortable. Existential dread aside, I find myself in Francestown Cemetery No. 3, standing face-to-face with the weathered and near-illegible family memorial of the Starrett family, whose members’ lives spanned the 18th and 19th centuries.
It’s there that Manchester-based illustrator Sara Richard and her mother, Carol Richard, have chosen to set up shop for the day.
The mother-daughter duo, known as the “Graveside Ladies,” volunteer their time to clean old headstones; where time, weather and acid rain have begun to eat away the record on the stone, and with that record, the last representation of the person buried below.
With effort, patience and the right equipment, the Graveside Ladies are able to restore headstones that have been neglected and overtaken by lichen, so that the deceased’s names are easily read and the stone shines like new. After all, a headstone is like a nice car, and the deceased paid good money to be remembered.
The Graveside Ladies’ primary goal isn’t to turn every stone gleaming white again, but preserve identites.
“The person’s existence is being wiped away, because what we’re cleaning off is biological,” Carol says. “The algae, mosses and lichens are all living creatures that have roots that breakdown the stone.”
They started cleaning together about four or five years ago by caring for their own ancestor’s stones, but Carol has been involved in the cemetery scene for more than a decade. She is an avid contributor on Find a Grave, a website where people on genealogical quests can find memorials, gravesites and cemetery records of deceased family members, and is a member of the New Hampshire Old Graveyard Association (NHOGA).
Carol joined NHOGA because they teach members the basics of graveyard preservation and were already doing what she wanted to do.
“It’s not an interest that’s valued very highly,” Carol says. “People say ‘Oh, that’s weird, why are you bothering? They’re dead.’ Someday, you’ll be there, and your stone will look like crap, and maybe you’ll say, ‘It’d be nice if someone came along and cleaned my stone.’”
“These are all people that once walked around this town,” says Carol, gesturing to the rows of headstones that stretch to either end of the cemetery. “They have descendants alive today. Don’t write them off because they’re dead.”
The Graveside Ladies aren’t just wandering through New Hampshire’s cemeteries and graveyards at random. They usually start by cleaning the grave of a distant relative, and while they’re there, they make note of other headstones that are in need of help. Sometimes, they’ll feel called to a particular stone, but oftentimes it’s more randomized. Ideally, they’ll get permission from a descendant, or through a trustee of the site, but permissions vary on a cemetery-by-cemetery basis.
They haven’t been met with any pushback, but sometimes towns won’t grant them permission to clean, out of fears that they’ll use bleach and other harmful cleaning agents, or will power-wash the stones.
“We’re not going to mess it up,” Sara says. “We’ve taken classes and attended workshops. We use the same cleaning products they use at Arlington National Cemetery, and our brushes aren’t any stronger than something you would use on your car or dishes.”
Using only plastic spatulas, dish brushes, water, the biological cleaning solution D/2 and time, Carol and Sara are able to gently remove damaging lichens from headstones, so the names of the deceased can be read for, hopefully, the next century.
The most common stone types they come across are marble, slate, and, of course, granite.
“Marble only needs a light scrub with D/2 solution once every 10 years. The action of the brush will cause it to break down into a sugar-like substance, if you clean it too often,” Sara says. “You can scrub a bit more with granite, and you’ll see slate at the really old cemeteries, like in Portsmouth and Salem. Those hold detail really well, but they’re striated vertically, so if water gets in any of those cracks, it’ll crack.”
After they’ve identified the next grave that they want to clean, the Graveside Ladies will pull records and do research into the life and death of the person whose grave they’re cleaning. This makes for a detailed Find a Grave submission, so living descendants can learn about their ancestor, and lets the cleaners get to know the person a little more. Even though many of the residents of the graves that they’re cleaning passed away hundreds of years ago, Sara and Carol form personal connections with the people they’re helping.
They introduce me to the Eatons, a young couple who passed away within a year of each other and are interred together.
“We adopted their stone to make sure they’re alright,” Sara says. “We always say hi to them when we’re here.”
The Eatons lived and died during the Victorian era, which is perhaps best known for its death and mourning practices. Unlike today, Victorians lived closely with death. Sara and Carol make a point to call out each grave that belonged to a child or anyone who died well before their time.
In the days before penicillin and modern medicines, illnesses were often fatal. Funeral homes weren’t commonplace until the massive casualties of the Civil War warranted their necessity; Victorians would prepare their deceased family members for burial, and would hold wakes in their front parlor.
Some may look at the Victorian fascination with death and say it’s spooky and macabre, but there was no disconnect between the living and dead like there is today.
“When somebody dies, they kind of go away,” Sara says. “Someone comes, takes them away, and makes them look like they’re sleeping. Back in the day, you would’ve had home funerals. You would’ve been there with the body every step of the way, and I think that’s what we’re missing now and why people are so skeeved out about death.”
For Sara, the “Memento Mori” mentality makes the thought of death easier.
“It reminds you to leave a good story, be a good person and lead a good life,” she says. “Yes. You are going to die, but the more you do stuff like this and talk about death, it gets easier to talk about.”
As comfortable with the idea of death as she may be, Sara isn’t callous about it. She knows that she’ll be devastated when her mother passes, but she has a clear idea of what Carol wants when the time comes, which will relieve some of the extra stress and panic with the funerary process. In fact, Carol recently toured a cemetery in New Boston, where she purchased a family plot with a beautiful view at the top of the hill.
“I wish I could have a tree there,” she says. “But that’s one of their rules — no trees. It overlooks the village, and in the fall, it’s beautiful. My husband’s like, ‘We’ve gotta get a bench!’”
“I’m in the process of looking for a stone, but it has to be the right stone,” says Carol, who isn’t considering the aging process in her headstone selection. “Your kids are going to get you one, so if you want it bad enough, get it yourself. Get what you want.”
When walking through any cemetery, you’ll frequently see a person’s cause of death etched into their headstone, especially if the person died uniquely.
“There seemed a modernly uncomfortable openness to accepting death and the harsh reality of a hard, laborious life,” Sara says. “You will find the most melancholically sweet, and morbidly clever, prose written in little epitaphs on stones of those lost in notable ways.”
Headstones are chosen with care. As the last testament to a life lived, the lettering, etchings and art are all carefully thought out and meticulously chosen. Sometimes, you’ll find typos and mistakes on older headstones (due to a lower literacy rate) but, like today, headstones were expensive. Every person who owns a headstone paid good money for it, and that investment deserves to be taken care of. Especially since older headstones often show status.
“The fancier your stone, the more clout you had in town,” Carol says.
“You still want your status showing after death,” Sara adds. “You can imagine those people would want that stone to be clean. Not to speak for anybody, but to put yourself in their shoes, you would want your best foot forward and to be represented nicely.”
Sara and Carol aren’t superstitious about spending their time in cemeteries, because they were once more similar to parks, and families would have picnics and spend time with their relatives.
“There’s so much superstition that’s like, if you hang out in a graveyard, you’re going to invite that into your life,” Sara says. “We’re all going to go. Why not take care of our ancestors who have already gone by?”
Along with “memento mori,” Sara feels that things like Caitlin Doughty’s death-positive movement can help people get more comfortable talking about death and facing their own mortality.
“As Doughty (a mortician, writer and activist) puts it, you’re open to talking about your mortality and how you want to be perceived after death,” Sara says. “It’s just being realistic. It kind of comes back to living a good life and doing good things.”
Sara and Carol would love to see more people out there doing this work, because it would not only help dispel any stigma that comes with this line of volunteering, but it also helps to beautify and preserve the local community. One Scout troop recently cleaned a small cemetery in Deerfield for their preservation patch, and Sara said that it now looks like new.
“A lot of cemetery stuff happens around Halloween, but it’s a year-long thing,” Sara says. “You can practice mindfulness at a cemetery, just going for a walk or picking up branches. If anyone has social anxiety, what better place is there to be amongst people?”
To view the cleaning process and read about NHOGA visit here.
