The Living Cemetery

On a steep bank of hills nestled between Forbes St., Ingleside Terrace and West Main St., Mountain Home Cemetery is laced with walking trails amongst the 28 acres of burial ground, which I cut through on my trips to and from campus each day. The elevation raises the cemetery out of the noise of the streets and the stress of college classes.  It takes me about six minutes to cross through the trails onto West Main. For six minutes, I soak in mortality’s perspective releasing stress over relationships and homework. Often, it’s the best part of my day.

Dog walkers, studiers, joggers and bikers join me along the path. The cemetery is a mountain home for the dead and a sanctuary for the living.

Beneath the trimmed grass blanketing the graves lie the bones and sagging clothing of a young arctic explorer, a liberal senator and civil war colonel, a Dutch potato-famine profiteer-turned Kalamazoo city developer, the seventh governor of Michigan who previously served as a horseback-traveling abolitionist judge, a female journalist and slaughter house reformer who interviewed Mark Twain, the inventor of the easily digestible pill and the man who brought electricity to Michigan’s southwest.

Mountain Home was incorporated into the City of Kalamazoo in 1849. Trustees built a sexton lodge on West Main St. and a small chapel that served as a receiving vault for corpses in the winter, when the ground was too hard to cut with shovels. The private corporation sold the land to the city for one dollar in 1938, and now these buildings stand vacant.

On the eve of Memorial Day, as I ambled up the path, I saw a man with an enormous digger labeled Kuhn’s Yard and Garden Care covering up a hole with sheets plywood.  I stepped up the grassy slope and asked him if I could peek inside.  Once close enough to see the shallow hole, I said the hole didn’t look six feet deep. “Oh that’s just an old wives tale!” He said, shaking his gut. “Graves are four feet deep these days.” He dragged the final board over the hole and left.

Bruce Merchant and Janet Hippensteel coordinate care of the city’s cemeteries from their Kalamazoo Public Service Office.  They are good-humored civil servants who finish each other’s sentences. When someone dies, funeral homes contact them to contract burial proceedings. Overseeing the cemetery brings the two unexpected occupational challenges. The hills’ steep incline pulls at the heavy memorials, which topple over under decades of stress.  Merchant and Hippensteel can’t legally repair these fallen headstones, because the sold plots are private property. “Most of the people that are buried there don’t have any relatives that maintain that grave. Stones fall over, stones get pushed over, foundations weren’t made properly.  We don’t know what to do all the time because we don’t have money, nor can we legally touch that stone,” said Merchant.

The two collect articles and historical documents on Mountain Home including a copy of the burial ground’s incorporation document, and the original deed to the land written in fountain pen and marked with sealing wax. The incorporation booklet offers rules for the cemetery concerning the sales and maintenance including rule three, which states, “Strangers can receive, on application to any Trustee, a permit to enter the cemetery with a carriage on any days other than Sundays and Holidays.” And twelve: “No person is to be admitted on horse-back.”

Gravestones face the trails partitioning the fifteen sections in the cemetery, marked with white numbered and lettered signs. As I walk along the paths, hundreds of cut stones vie for attention, and I remember a quote from a radio show. “There are three deaths. The first is when the body ceases to function. The second is when the body is consigned to the graved. The third is that moment, sometime in the future, when your name is spoken for the last time.” I contemplate these deaths most days as I pass by my favorite headstones for the Lakes, the Sterns, and the Bryants. They are twice dead and anticipating a third and final death. Sometimes, I murmur the names printed on the graves I walk past.

Patrick Gailey ’12 found one headstone of interest early in his time studying at K. He refers to the handsome car-sized memorial commemorating the Bardeen family by name. "If you go on a walk in the graveyard, chances are you’re going to end up at Bardeen. It’s where the path naturally leads you,” he said. He and his friends walk past the sign discouraging their entrance after dark, ascend to the cemetery’s highest point and climb atop the Bardeen’s tomblike memorial. They engage in what Gailey calls “illicit activities” on top of the stone while enjoying the view of Kalamazoo. “I’ve always done a lot of thinking about Bardeen” he said. “Is it disrespectful that you’re just hanging out with friends on top of this beautiful family gravestone? I’ve always thought that it’s actually more of like an honor to enjoy life on top of the gravestone. To hang out there, and maybe even by hanging out there with friends, you’re like absorbing some of this wisdom of this very old family.”

Gailey breaks incorporation rule number eight, which states that “all persons who shall be found on the grounds making unseemly noises or otherwise conducting themselves unsuitably to the purposes to which the grounds are appropriated will be requested to leave the grounds.”  Unlike the rest of the archaic rules, Merchant and Hippensteel see modern application to this rule. “I think the saddest part is the lack of respect that people have anymore for cemeteries,” said Hippensteel, who has served through many acts of vandalism, including one year the week after Memorial Day weekend, some vandals knocked over more than 80 headstones at Riverside Cemetary. “That’s the stuff that breaks my heart,” she said. “I just don’t understand why people have to be so destructive and disturb something like that. It just makes no sense to me whatsoever.”

Though Merchant and Hippensteel disapprove of Gailey’s “illicit activities” on Bardeen, they understand the impulse of the living to connect with the deceased. Their office sponsors cemetery clean-up days around Memorial Day weekend during which boy scouts plant flags and collect rubbish and mementos scattering the graves. “The things people leave on the gravesites are interesting,” said Merchant. Volunteers often find framed photos, stuffed animals, flowers, money, balloons and unopened beer bottles places near headstones. The beer, says Hippensteel, is left by sons on Father’s Day who drink a bottle sitting near the grave and leave one for their dad.  “That’s something that’s touching to me,” she said.

The night after I speak with the man who dug the grave, I walk back through Mountain Home’s trail and approach the abandoned site.  I stand before the plywood covering the hole, and lift the corner of one board.  Expecting to see nothing, the cement vault lining the bottom of the grave frightens me, and I back away.

On Memorial Day, parents bring their sons to the cemetery to remind them of fallen soldiers. The children are excited, spotting entire families whose labeled stones somehow connote a household like theirs packed down into the dirt beneath them. A boy remarked that a tombstone bearing the last name “Ash” reminds him of the Pokémon character of the same name. An elderly couple pulled up onto the path in a rust colored Subaru Outback. They emerged with a potted red pansy and a trawl. The elderly man in a salmon polo and jeans knelt onto his long haunches and broke earth with the trawl as his wife filled up a navy watering can at a wooden and steel spigot. When she returned, her husband had packed the flower into the dry ground. He stood up, stared at his work for a moment, and his wife drizzled water onto the flower. A young couple emerged from on top of the hill and whizzed by on their Schwinn bicycles, screaming. The woman continued to water the plant slowly, and the bikers skirted by silently once they saw they weren’t alone. They circled by on their bikes once more as the elderly couple threw out the green plastic flowerpot and shut the Subaru’s trunk. The car slipped into reverse before heading forward up the hill along the cement path. Stretching his eyes to see up the hill, the man in the salmon polo ran over a dead gray bird, already smashed into the path. As the car pulled away, flies inspected the bird’s facedown carcass and its fettered feathers.

When I walk past the hole the next morning on my way to class, I see the tents and chairs set up around the gravesite in preparation of a funeral at noon.  After class, I walk past the site again where I see a man named Tom de Vreese operating a metal apparatus over the hole with arms flecked by white sunspots.  I ask what he’s doing, and he tells me he’s lowering the casket.  I’m surprised by his openness as he explains how he slides the casket onto rollers out of the back of his covered truck and lowers it into the earth on a system of straps. “It’s a one person job.  I do one or two a day,” he said smiling with his blue eyes. I peer into the hole again, and see a dark wooden casket covered by six wilting roses nestled into the cement vault. I asked him if he knows the name of the woman he just buried. “Nope! I never do.”

As I pass the fresh grave one day later, the ground is brown and compacted over the hole, carpeted with grass seeds.

Memorial night shadows over the graveyard. Dusk meets crickets, moonlight, and spring’s first fireflies. The graves cast no more shadows, and the storm that never came smells humid and sweet between the warm grass and cool air. On the rolling hills, gravestones are just visible and dull in the purple light. The trees are still, and I remember what Patrick Gailey said about his future burial.  “I want the people I leave behind to commemorate my death in a way that gives them peace,” he said.  “Graveyards are for the living."