Beginning in 1997, those I loved and depended on for companionship were dying in rapid succession. 12 years old, Pete died from kidney failure likely due to drinking coolant that rose with the water table every time it rained – he loved to drink from puddles. Buddy (my protector and trickster) returned with me to California and died a year and a half later – 16 years old, old for a large dog; he broke my heart looking for Pete wherever we visited our old haunts. I now bury my pets in my yard, there’s some comfort to being able to visit them at will, any day, and having a place.
I was desperate to return to California by the end of 1997, since my father’s second bypass surgery; I returned March 1998, he died in May 1999, before my defense and degree award Fall 1999. I am glad I had an opportunity to spend some quality time with him. He unconditionally supported my decision to go to college, but like my mother did not understand how that would improve my livelihood or survival, or my need for a doctorate as we are working middle-class heroes and I should be raising a family – supporting a husband’s career. My brother died one year later, at the beginning of my first semester of teaching full-time for which I am now tenured. In 2000, as I was preparing a GIS lab exercise, I realized through the online national GNIS database search of cemeteries with my last name, that my historic roots on my father’s side of the family are the Upland South where “Nance” cemeteries follow the courses of river throughout the Tennessee River Valley into Missouri and elsewhere – I’d know we were hillbilly immigrants but not that I was living within that diaspora while in Louisiana. Many Nance’s that I meet come from Missouri (or “Misery” as dad called it) – black and white.
With distance and time comes fondness for something that no longer exists. Although I was determined to leave both Flagstaff and Baton Rouge once the ends to my means had been met, I miss both places, in that space and time. But, they have both changed radically – hotel, restaurant and fast-food chains, interstate expansions – greater commuting distances and new suburbs, new malls and big box stores. I saw the second wave of California migrants hit Baton Rouge, as they did Flagstaff – that for which they fled they demanded upon arrival – the very entrapments of metropolitan California that were their undoing. In this advent, I pondered what would happen to Louisiana’s cemeteries. So, during Mardi Gras 2004 I did a follow up sample survey of cemeteries I had previously visited in 1997 and found that they persisted in spite of adverse circumstances of evolving landscapes around them. In fact, one was being reused by a new family that had relocated to the rural area, likely for its quaintness and local customs!
To the other extreme, Los Angeles cemeteries are acquiring land as far away as 80 miles from the City of Los Angeles, in the high desert. Crematoriums and their towering mausoleums are preference by necessity – space is limited. And, burial places are being repurposed with weddings and other events held in, for instance, Hollywood Forever’s cemetery. The cemetery Marilyn Monroe is buried in has been built over by skyscrapers on Wilshire Boulevard that along with billboards overshadow what little is left of high profile burials. In defiance of space limitations, eccentrics blast their ashes in capsules as space junk and others as fireworks. We are a mobile society, rarely are all members of a family buried in the same place – once buried they are remembered in less enduring ways such as rear window memorials or roadside crossed..
I tested the results of my analysis of cemetery abandonment in Louisiana in relation to several factors (population and transportation change, and more) and discovered that Los Angeles cemeteries were built over, graves reused many times, blacks buried in what had once been white cemeteries – Compton, for example, ethnic segregation in placement of cemeteries beyond city limited and near railroad track confluences with nuisance highways/interstates, warehousing and trucking activities. In fact, the first Forest Lawn in Glendale was built on the same site as an historic cemetery abandoned around 1907, but no one remembers where it was within the rolling expanse of this large memorial park. And, the Pioneer Cemetery has been abandoned and preserved, abandoned and preserved repeatedly.
Contrary to Louisiana statutes which encourage preservation and fine “in perpetuity” defaults, California statutes accommodate development by decommissioning a cemetery if five years have passed without activity – or for the greater good of the living population. If no one pays for or removes the remains or grave marker they are relocated outside metropolitan areas or warehoused. Land demands, population growth (which is by nature accompanied by death) and segregation impacted Los Angeles cemeteries before the earliest USGS maps were created, 1940s – we may never know where all the dead have gone but one thing is for sure cemeteries have not increased in size since the 1960s. We are creating and adapting to new attitudes toward death and where/how to store human remains which is the topic of a book I drafted for publication in 2007: Razing the Dead: Traditional Cemetery Abandonment and Changing Attitudes toward a Place for the Dead. Many traditional practices are rapidly being abandoned out of necessity, in a rapidly evolving non-place based society.