Our deaths, our graves and how we’re remembered

The New York Times recently carried a story that began “Karl Marx may be resting in peace, but he now does so under 24/7 surveillance.” Marx, buried in London’s Highgate Cemetery, needs protection from vandals who have desecrated his 12-foot tall monument. Born in Germany in 1818, he has been a Highgate resident since 1883.

For those who missed an 8 a.m. Western Civilization class, Marx is the author of “The Communist Manifesto” and “Das Kapital” — the father of Marxism. Hence, the enmity of some visitors.

People rarely visit graves to dis the dead. For most of us, what’s the point. Not only is Marx dead, so is Marxism, except in the minds of a few leftist scholars and a small but hardy band of activists who gather to chant “Workers of the world, unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains.”

I have never seen a grave that I was sure had been desecrated. But I have seen graves treated with a sense of humor. I knew a man who had been married twice. He is buried between the two wives. A wag who clearly knew the three of them placed a pair of earplugs on the man’s grave.

Most people visit graves to pay their respect or out of curiosity. The grave of writer Oscar Wilde in Paris draws thousands of visitors every year and must be protected from adulation, especially the chemicals left in lipstick by those who kiss his gigantic stone.

I have visited many graves myself, like others out of respect or curiosity. And I have visited graves on occasion almost by accident. Near Ulm, Germany, I was seeing a girl and we went for a stroll. Our walk brought us to the local graveyard, where we encountered Erwin Rommel. The memorial accompanying the burial spot needed to be handled with care. He was a great general — but he also was in the service of Nazi Germany.

Other graves I have encountered while walking with friends or by myself include jazzmen Duke Ellington, Miles Davis and Illinois Jacquet (in the Bronx), Alexander Hamilton and Robert Fulton (Manhattan), Henry James and William James (Cambridge, Mass.). Ellington and Davis have exceptionally large stones, standing tall even in death.

The poet William Butler Yeats’ grave is one of the most visited in Ireland. It’s in a rural area, near Sligo. Tall Benbulben Mountain is in the distance. Yeats wrote his own epitaph: “Cast a cold eye on life, on death, horseman pass by.”

Composer Richard Wagner’s grave is in the yard of his home in Bayreuth, not far from his famed opera house. As I walked down to the grave, a bolt of lightning flamed above me and thunder exploded. I thought, “Uh oh, twilight of the gods.”

I’ve been to Napoleon’s tomb in Paris and Grant’s tomb in Manhattan, but tombs are so big and larded with historical testimony, it is hard to think of them as graves. I don’t think of the pyramids as graves either.

The grave of the great Nez Perce leader Chief Joseph in eastern Washington is memorable for its simplicity and for the tributes people leave. I saw not just flowers but nickels and dimes, American Indian trinkets and trinkets made in India, food. A can of beer too. Oh yes, and feathers. I had the impression that the visitors who left tributes were serious, but not all serious in the same way.

Graveyards have long been a place for reflection. In Victorian Scotland, it was common for good Presbyterian families to spend part of Sunday walking past graves meditating on the vanity of human wishes, Children needed reminding: There is no escape from the grave.

Halifax, Nova Scotia, is home to 150 women and men of the 1,500 Titanic dead. The bodies were brought to Halifax after the Titanic sank in April 1912. I found walking the grounds a revelation — the blunt, kick-in-the-face reality of sudden death.I have read about the Titanic, seen Hollywood movies and documentaries about the sinking — even looked up some of the original stories in the New York papers. The dead were not characters in a book, film, documentary or newspaper story. They were once living, breathing people and have been dead since 1912. This was not film art or prose. This was silent, unchanging fact.

A woman I know told me she planned to be buried on a farm in Illinois. I asked “You like it there?” She replied, “I better like it there. I am going to be there a long time.” The Titanic dead did not get to choose.

Another friend who. like the woman I just mentioned, is a habitual graveyard visitor, does not like cremation. He told me, after we visited a graveyard in rural Minnesota, “You need a place to walk to — and a place to walk away from.” That was 20 years ago. I am still thinking about this.

Michael Carey is an Anchorage Daily News columnist. He can be reached at mcarey@adn.com.

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