I like cemeteries. By the time I was 5, all my grandparents had died. We visited the cemetery often, and thus it never bothered me the way it does some people. They are quiet, generally well-kept, and interesting.
So when we were looking for something to do after brunch on Sunday and going inside for a movie on such a beautiful day just wouldn't work, I suggested we visit some of Seattle's famous graves. I was thinking of Jimi Hendrix, but he's way out in Renton, and Kim smartly thought of Bruce and Brandon Lee, who are in Lake View cemetery in Capitol Hill.
If we'd been home first, we would have consulted Find a Grave first, it's really the ultimate Web resource for famous people's last resting places. But we didn't have Net access, so we kind of just wandered around the cemetery, figuring we'd spot the Family Lee. Kim kind of knew what the graves looked like and I was confident that we'd spot them from the sheer number of flowers and offerings that I figured are spread across them year-round. So our plan was good, but somehow we didn't stumble across them at all. (It's OK, it was still a beautiful Sunday for wandering.) When we looked the Lees up on the Web, we had trouble believing we missed their graves, they're so polished and bright and elegant, and they look a million times different than most of the other markers there.
Once I started surfing Find a Grave, I found some really interesting things:
Ian Curtis of Joy Division has their most famous song, "Love will tear us apart," inscribed on his gravemarker.
I recently visited JFK's grave at Arlington, but I didn't know that the English people have a lovely monument to him in the UK that reads in part "This acre of English ground was given to the United States of America by the people of Britain in memory of John F. Kennedy." Aw. Damn you Brits, you always make me cry.
I was a big fan of Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone, who died in a plane crash along with his wife and adult daughter a few years ago. He's buried in Minneapolis' Lakewood Cemetery, which is right down the street from where I lived in Uptown Minneapolis. I was touched to see that his main WELLSTONE marker is a big rounded stone, and that people have come and left stones on it, as well as bumper stickers, buttons, and other offerings. But it's the stones that seem the most simple and touching, somehow.
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4 comments:
The 'stones on the marker' thing is a Jewish custom (http://www.jewish-funerals.org/stones.htm). Was Paul Wellstone Jewish?
Yes, Paul Wellstone was Jewish.
Every time I take a visitor to visit the Lee graves, I *always* miss them the first time around! There's a big bush next to them--it's the only way I can ever discover them. They're pretty much straight up into the cemetery from the main entrance. Try again!
- Shannon
I grew up next to a cememetery...I learned early on-the only thing we had to worry about was the living; the dead never bothered us!
It was the living who deposited a Pepsi machine in our front yard one night...I'm pretty sure the dead didn't have access to a truck.
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