Mourning Dove

Indigenous to North and Central America, this member of the pigeon family is known for its mournfully plaintive call, “cooOOoo-coo-coo-coo” and the whistling of its wings as it takes flight. It’s interesting that this term came up in our keyword searches for cemetery-related items–I always thought it was morning dove!

In Christianity, the dove represents the Holy Spirit, but is has had many different cultural meanings throughout history. For instance in Jewish history, a dove was sometimes sacrificed for a mother’s purification after childbirth. In Slavic culture, the soul turns into a dove at the moment of death. In the John Prine song, Jesus, The Missing Years, Jesus takes out his guitar and writes a song called “The Dove of Love Fell off the Perch.”

Roadside Memorials

The mourning rituals practiced by today’s fast-moving society are quite novel. Though one rarely feels uplifted by the sad bouquet of soggy stuffed animals tied to the telephone pole, we should respect the fact that people are finding their own ways to deal with loss. Spontaneous memorials like this roadside cross seldom stir up images of a life well spent and a just reward. Rather, they indicate sudden, unexpected, and usually violent death. These are abrupt memorials marking an abrupt loss of life.

People take comfort in ritual. These spontaneous memorials honor the memory of the deceased and provide us with ritual closure. Their purpose is no different from a heavily orchestrated church memorial service, though they are much more informal and personal. While spontaneous memorials may be outside the bounds of social decorum, they are free and low-key )sort of like burying your relative’s ashes on the sly, next to the family grave marker).

Further Reading: A Lively Look at the History of Death

Urn -Vessel of the Soul

I would hazard to guess that urns were the most common sculptural symbol in Victorian-era cemeteries. A Greek symbol of mourning, the urn represents the body as a container of the soul. In ancient Greece, the urn was a repository for the ashes of the dead, so it has quite a literal and functional meaning in a cemetery.

Often the urn is draped with a pall (seen in background), a cloth sometimes used to drape a closed casket. A coffin or casket can also be called a pall, by the way (hence pallbearers). The practice of draping is not isolated to urns, as you can see from this image.

Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep – Further Exploration into the Symbolism of Death

The heading of this final section is the title of Mary Elizabeth Frye’s famous bereavement poem, reprinted below. As lives are concluded, we mourn the loss. Everywhere we look, we are reminded of the deceased, until time heals the wound. We feel it’s unfair to forget them, but we must get on with our lives. Quite possibly, the grave marker serves this purpose for many people. Subconsciously, at least, we officially mark their place on this earth so no one thinks us callous, and then we get on with our lives. Monuments and symbols become coping mechanisms, cemeteries become landscapes of memories. The world becomes a continual reminder of what once was.

Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep – by Mary Elizabeth Frye

Do not stand at my grave and weep. I am not there; I do not sleep.

I am a thousand winds that blow, I am the diamond glints on snow, I am the sun on ripened grain, I am the gentle autumn rain.

When you wake in the morning’s hush, I am the swift uplifting rush of quiet birds in circled flight. I am the soft stars that shine at night.

Do not stand at my grave and cry, I am not there; I did not die.

The verse has abundant symbolism, all related to the tension between letting go and holding on. While some cemetery symbols we’ve seen in this article can depict both the end as well as a beginning (e.g., the hourglass with wings), we’ve seen others that simply lament the fact that we are mortal. As we wrestle with our own interpretations of symbols, death, and the afterlife, it is best to consider what (the 17th Century English author) John Milton said:

“The mind is its own place, and in itself, can make heaven of Hell, and a hell of Heaven.”

To read more about the psychology of mourning, you may want to read: Remembering Well: Rituals for Celebrating Life and Mourning Death (Hardcover)

by Sarah York

If you ever feel the need to feast on the lion’s share of funerary symbolism, visit Arlington Cemetery’s Mourning Arts Museum in Drexel Hill, PA (outside Philadelphia).

Wolf Tables – More than Markers of Burial Plots

While not so much a symbol as a practical device, wolf stones and wolf tables do remind us of the mortality of the flesh. These devices were used where thin soil and/or rocky terrain prevented the digging of deep graves. Here’s a photo of me sitting on a wolf table at a cemetery in Camden, NJ.

(Before this cemetery received an overhaul, it had a 4 x 8 sheet of plywood at the entrance, on which was painted the message: “No unauthorized burials permitted.”)

Stone slabs over graves offered some protection from scavenging wolves. Ben Franklin’s grave in Christ Church burial ground in Philadelphia is an example of a wolf stone. While it may seem a quaint practice to toss a penny onto his grave (“A penny saved is a penny earned”), the Christ Church Preservation Trust actually rakes up about $1800 a year, which helps defray the cost of site maintenance!

Cemetery Gate (Through which Souls Pass)

Another guardian of the grave is the cemetery gate. As you can see from the photo, cemetery gates can be just plain creepy, whether they be an entrance to a fenced family plot or a main gate. A gate or a barred entrance can symbolize the gates of Heaven; the entrance of the departed into the afterlife. This gate is that of the Baltimore National Cemetery.

In the late 1800s, people were just dying to get into Historic Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia. One of the entrance gates had to be equipped with a turnstile in order to control the flow of horse-drawn carriage visitors into the cemetery!

In the Victorian era (roughly 1837 to 1901), the cemetery was the place to spend a quiet afternoon, as there were no arboretums, parks or museums to provide bucolic getaways from the noisy cities. That is, until the time came that the huge number of visitors and tourists forced Laurel Hill to begin issuing gate passes to lot holders and restricting Sunday visits to family members! (Read more about Laurel Hill Cemetery.)

Read more: The Very Quiet Baltimoreans: A Guide to the Historic Cemeteries and Burial Sites of Baltimore

Women and the Art of Mourning

As men are not allowed to be wholly emotional beings in Western society, women appear to be the designated grievers. This is why there are so many more melancholy women than men depicted in symbolic cemetery memorials. Apart from the odd centurion or archangel, men are typically characterized as their successful earthly selves.

For more on this topic, please see the book Saving Graces: Images of Women European Cemeteries by David Robinson.

Babies, Children, and Cherubs

Another of the famous rural Victorian garden cemeteries (actually the first of its kind in the U.S.) is Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Mount Auburn Cherub was photographed here. Babies, Children, and Cherubs typically represent the untimely death of a child. As such, the symbol can invoke only sadness and death.

Walking through old American cemeteries, it is not unusual to see many hundred-year-old tombstones of children who died before they were two years old-sometimes from the same family as we see in the photo to the left.

We don’t see this as much today since childhood mortality is much lower than it was in the 1800s–mainly due to better living conditions, prenatal care, and vaccinations. Mount Auburn Cemetery (est. 1831), just outside Boston on the Harvard campus, is the nation’s first landscaped or “garden” cemetery. The inception of these outdoor sculpture gardens became a catalyst as well as repository for symbolism new and old.

Read more about Mount Auburn Cemetery: Portsmouth Cemeteries (Images of America) by Glenn A. Knoblock

This is not surprising, as Western society appears to be much more fascinated with death than with the afterlife (a quick scan of popular music and literature should make this plainly evident). In one place we are presented with historical, religious, architectural, genealogical, demographical, and sociological manifestations of society’s desire to memorialize the dead.

We’re all familiar with such symbols as the Star of David, and variations of the cross, but what about broken trees and wolf tables, i.e., symbols of death rather than the afterlife? In this article we’ll have a look at some common and some not-so-common symbols, all associated with letting go. So let’s first look at Mortality, that’s the big one.

Father Time

Much like the Grim Reaper, Father Time is often depicted with a sickle or scythe. Will this mythical personification of time use the instrument to cut us down in our prime? No. Father Time had his origin as Saturn, the Roman Deity of Time and an ancient Italian Corn God known as the Sower (the Greeks referred to him as Cronus or Kronos). Male ruler of the Roman Gods before Jupiter, Saturn’s weapon was a scythe. The Roman holiday of Saturnalia was a celebration of the harvest, hence the scythe. It was not until the Middle Ages that the Grim Reaper depictions familiar to us came into being.Father Time’s old, bent body reminds us that time is the devourer of all things and that, like the sand in the hourglass, his physical vitality will eventually run out -as will ours.In the image “Father Time,” atop a Masonic monument in Queens, NY, the sculptor seems to have taken liberties with symbolism. Angel wings? Your guess is as good as mine. Letting the imagination soar is not an uncommon thing in funerary sculpture. It is the one place where sculptors and architects are not required to follow any one particular style.

Hourglass

As long as we’re on the subject of time, let’s look at one of its symbols–the hourglass. In addition to actually being used as a timekeeping device, the hourglass in the mourning arts conjures the notion of time’s passing and the inevitability of death. Again, time flies, as seen on this cemetery gate emblem (Woodlands Cemetery, Philadelphia). One of the most amazing funerary sculptures I’ve ever seen is on the rear gatehouse of Baltimore’s Louden Park Cemetery-a huge hundred-plus-year-old wooden carving depicting the hourglass with wings. An hourglass indicates the person’s time on earth ran out and suggests that we should embrace life because it, much like the flow of the sand in an hourglass, is finite and will eventually end. Other funerary symbols that essentially say the same thing are the cut tree and the broken pillar.

Human Bones

Another example of the hourglass is depicted above crossed bones, on this stone in an old Quaker churchyard cemetery in Philadelphia. Both symbols are of rudimentary design and therefore were easy to carve. Crossed bones remind us that our earthly bodies will someday die.

According to Wikipedia, actual skulls and bones were long used to mark the entrances to Spanish cemeteries. The practice, dating back to the 1700s, led to the symbol eventually becoming associated with the concept of death. It is interesting to note how the skull and crossbones (depicted on headstones in the 1700s) evolved into the cherub head with wings by the mid-1800s. The change is coincident with society’s changing (i.e., less terrifying) attitudes toward death.

Weeping Willow Tree

Most plants and trees in cemetery ornamentation symbolize the positive, goodness, the afterlife. My father used to refer to death as “pushing up daisies,” a happy notion. The willow, however, is one of the few plants that is plainly indicative of sorrow and mourning. “Nature’s lament,” is how the weeping willow is referred to in Rochester’s Glossary of Victorian Cemetery Symbolism, but why this association with death? Well, cemetery trees in general have a mystique about them. Edgar Lee Masters, in his “Spoon River Anthology” writes how people “…move into the soil and into the flesh of the tree, and into the living epitaphs…” As for the willow itself, Greek mythology has it that the sorceress Circe had a cemetery planted with willow trees dedicated to Hecate (perceived for the most part as the goddess of witchcraft or evil) and her magic. Here men’s corpses were left exposed in the tops of the trees for the birds and elements to devour. From this association with grief and death came the practice of placing willow branches inside coffins, and the planting of young saplings on graves of the departed.

According to the Wiccans, the ancient Celts believed that the spirit of the dead would rise up into the sapling planted above, which would grow and retain the essence of the departed person.

Truth be told, you don’t generally see the willow carved onto tombstones after the 1850s. Prior to that it appeared to be a fairly common symbol. This tattoo belongs to a member of the AGS, Association for Gravestone Studies.

Further reading: The Complete World of Greek Mythology by Richard Buxton

Six feet up and not six feet under is increasingly the direction in which people want their remains stored when they die, representatives of the funeral industry say. In addition to custom single-family mausoleums, community mausoleums for both coffins and cremated remains are also gaining popularity; in classical or contemporary styles, these often have room to hold hundreds of niches for coffins or urns.

The Cold Spring Granite Company, among the country’s largest makers of cemetery monuments, sold 2,000 private mausoleums last year, up from about 65 during a good year in the 1980′s. Prices range from $250,000 to “well into the millions,” said Michael T. Baklarz, a vice president of the company.

Not everyone wants an elaborate burial. According to the article

industry experts say that more than a quarter of the 2.3 million people who died in 2004 were cremated – and some opted for new forms of interment like the “green burials” that flickered onto the cultural radar after a character from the HBO series “Six Feet Under” was buried unembalmed and without a coffin, in an unmarked grave protected by a nature preserve.

Yet the brief buzz about eco-burial, executives from America’s nearly $15 billion funeral industry say, may obscure the larger reality that, as in seemingly every other facet of contemporary life, the taste for personalization has touched the funeral industry in time to provide an otherwise static business with an opportunity for growth.

It seems like the funeral industry is becoming more proactive. Instead of waiting until death occurs and pitching affordable options, they’re going after the still-living wealthy.

The practice carried across the Pond in 1831 with the founding of Mount Auburn Cemetery, in Cambridge, Ma. Photographic subjects here and from Laurel Hill (Philadelphia), and the Metairie Cemeteries (New Orleans) hearken back to the 1800s when such unique memorial gardens served the public as an idyllic getaway from the noisy city. Now forgotten by the public and worn by the elements, this rare artwork was enjoyed by our ancestors long before museums, galleries, and parks came into being.

Now, you’d think statues of semi-nude women would have clashed with Victorian sensibilities, wouldn’t you? Especially in a cemetery– a reverent public place frequented by the public! What role do these women play in the grieving process? They are symbolic, of course, but of what, affluence? These (typically life-sized) sensual figures do give memorial parks a feeling of life, which really was the original intent of the architects of the early garden cemeteries.

In his book, Death: The Trip of a Lifetime (1995), Greg Palmer offers that in many cultures, women are the designated grievers.” Ok, but why physically attractive females? As David Robinson says in his book Saving Graces, “Their gowns are revealing and they are often topless and sometimes nude.” He goes on to say that these statues were often individually commissioned and sculpted, often by famous sculptors. The image of the Warner Memorial at Laurel Hill Cemetery in Philadelphia, for instance, was sculpted by Alexander Calder’s great grandfather. In Western artistic tradition, the ability to accurately depict the female figure is what most defines artistic talent. So again, why physically attractive females? While her countenance may effectively express true sorrow and loss, there are no ugly angels. The anguish in the faces of the angels in “Lost at Sea” is no doubt meant to express the feeling felt by the man who lost his wife and daughter in a shipwreck off the coast of Louisiana in the mid 1800s off. This life-sized marble statue sits atop a mausoleum near the entrance to New Orleans’ grand Metairie Cemetery.

Besides the fact that most professional sculptors were male (we’ll assume at least some of them, like Rodin, were heterosexual) and these commissions afforded them a regular income, the sensuals provided an opportunity for them to bring their artistic fantasies to life for a noble purpose).

If death is portrayed as beautiful, perhaps it will lose its sting. For Romeo and Juliet, as with the Romantic era in general (1825 – 1900), death was the focus of extreme emotion and the ultimate expression of love (Robinson, 1995). This period of time coincides with Victorian era, in which the idea of death in art and popular culture became less associated with horror and fright and more with love and desire. No other era in Western culture has ever exhibited to such an extent the artistic emphasis on death as a visible part of the consciousness of an entire population. In her book Mourning Art and Jewelry, Maureen DeLorme tells us that the pressures of continually facing death as an intrusion (French Revolution, Napoleanic Wars, high mortality from plagues and disease, etc.) made the need to keep both the presence of the departed near at hand while at the same time bidding farewell. So the idea of sculpted sensual beings in cemeteries became a tangible realization of a new Western psychology. Their purpose? To comfort the living and soften the finality of death. While angels may epitomize the tension between freedom and confinement, the sensuals walk the tightrope between spiritual purity and earthly desire. Undeniably conflicting, yet totally human forces of nature.

The practice of memorializing the dead in such high fashion appears to have lost its appeal by the 1950s. A coincidence, perhaps, that this occurred in the era of artistic revolution plotted by Dylan Thomas (1952), in which he raged:

“Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day;

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

All things not being equal, there have been many economic, religious, social, and psychological changes in Western societies. Medicine has greatly decreased mortality rates. Familial ties are not what they once were. And a technological advance has contributed to this–the advent of the camera. The photograph relieves us of the burden of memory, Susan Sontag says in her essay, “Uses of Photography,” (in “On Looking,” J. Berger, Pantheon Books, 1980). “With the loss of memory the continuities of meaning and judgment are also lost to us… the camera records in order to forget. “