Waking the Living
LESS THAN ONE HUNDRED years ago, the Richmond district was a sea of graves. In the early 1900s, however, the city decided to relocate all its cemeteries.
As a result, there is more room to live in The City today, but you have to spend your eternIty in Colma. (Colma wins the morbid distinction of housing more dead than living people.)
The San Francisco Columbarium, however — built in 1898 by a group called the Order of the Odd Fellows — remains on Lorraine Street off Anza as the only cemetery for cremated remains inside city limits.
I was told that I might get a sense of San Francisco and Its history if I visited. Many of the niches commemorate the life of their occupants with teddy bears, baseballs, miniature crystal golf bags, cards, flowers, plastic figurines of Hawaiian dancers at a Luwa, Elvis and his twin brother Aaron. One space has a woman’s favorite television stars painted into the background as though they were perpetual spectators with her at a Giants game.
Besides, thinking about death in the abstract is like the great spell-check of life. We assess where we are at the moment and discover the mistakes we didn’t think we made before we move on to the inevitable mistakes we didn’t think we’d make again.
The original building design called for a Victorian-style sitting room in the center where visitors could feel at home with their loved ones, “divesting their minds,” according to the Odd Fellows, “of the unpleasant feeling that so often goes hand-in-hand with anything associated with the burial of the dead.” Small compartments are carved into the walls and columns, some in glass casing, some with metal covers and inscriptions on them. Everything is surprisingly sunny.
When I asked Emmitt Watson, the caretaker/historian on the grounds, about the sense of history I was told to expect, he said, “Well. I don't have any idea what they mean by that.”
“Maybe they mean ‘cause some of the old-time pioneers are buried here — the Folgers, the Steiners, the Eddies, Bacon Boggs.”
John C. Klumpke, for example, is memorialized on the outside of the building as a “territorial pioneer, 1825-1916.” Born in Germany, he came to CalIfornia In 1850 and became a prominent real estate developer. His daughter, Dorothea Klumpke Roberts, was a noted astronomer and mathematician. Anna Klumpke was an artist and the partner of animal painter Rosa Bonheur. Ms. Bonheur, apparently, visited slaughterhouses dressed as a man in order to study the anatomy of her subjects, and she received special license from the police to wear men's clothes for her work. Mr. Klumpke also owned some land south of the bay that passed from generation to generation until it was sold to the U.S. Forest Service In the 1960s. It is now part of the Ventana Wilderness.
In other words, the San Francisco Klumpkes went from development to conservation In one hundred years — with some drag thrown in for good measure.
I don’t know what I expected, but I don’t know if I was ready to confront the large number of young men who died in San Francisco in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s before they hit the age of 40 — sometimes before they hit 30.
Then I noticed the diversity. In so many other cities around the world, every ethnicity, race, religion or orientation has its own final resting place — often by force rather than choice. But here black, white, Asian, gay, lesbian names and faces occupy the space together. And one emblematic urn is inscribed with no more than a name and epitaph, “Native San Franciscan.”
Under Dorothea Klumpke Roberts' name is written: “She loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night.”
Before I left, I wrote it down and silently thanked everyone for the lessons.
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