No matter what anyone says Cincinnati is a wonderful city.  The name that the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow gave to the city “Queen of the West” was an inspirational insight.  Cincinnati is truly the Queen City of the West.

I lived many fruitful and fascinating years in Cincinnati, and I miss Cincinnati on a daily basis.  I miss other places, but Cincinnati and TVB just clicked.  First of all is the first class world famous Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra and their marvelous home located in Music Hall.  Then I always enjoy my five-ways at Skyline Chili, Graeter’s Ice Cream, Christian Moerlein Beer, metts, brats, Montgomery Ribs, Scotti’s Italian, Pompalio’s in Newport, Hathaway’s Coffee Shop in the Carew Tower, Mt. Adams,  Arnold’s Bar, Grammers, Findlay Market, the historic Schaefer & Busby Funeral Home (est. 1832) and of course Spring Grove Cemetery.

Other cities can rightfully be proud of their own rural cemeteries.  Boston/Cambridge has Mt. Auburn, Philadelphia has Laurel Hills, Baltimore has Greenmount, Brooklyn has Green-wood, Buffalo has Forest Lawn, the Bronx has Woodlawn, well friends the list goes on and on, and every rural cemetery has a history, a character and a ambience and panache that is unique and speaks a silent yet powerful message about the meaning of life and death.  Rural cemeteries are a good use of God’s great creation – earth.

I spent the weekend with my wife Georgia in Cincinnati, and naturally we ate Graeter’s, went to the symphony, had breakfast at Hathaway’s, and spent time on the grounds of Spring Grove.

I have always held to the notion that people are going to care for their dead in a consistent manner with how they live their lives, and nowhere, absolutely nowhere in the world is this sentiment experienced more completely than when strolling the grounds of Spring Grove Cemetery.

The utter scheme, size and layout of the cemetery grounds actually speaks volumes about the values and attitudes of the people who have made Cincinnati their home since the cemetery was first opened up.  It is impossible to walk the burial grounds without being keenly aware of the importance that Cincinnatians placed on the importance of ethically caring for their dead, and also to the importance they attached to the creativity of funerary architecture. Spring Grove is in actuality a city within a city.  It is a necropolis in the center of a metropolis. 

Memorialization, personalization of death, attachments to the dead, the esoteric meaning of death symbols, messages from the dead to the living, well they are all present, and highly visible within the boundaries of Spring Grove.

I have had a connection, albeit at a distance, with Spring Grove Cemetery for now going on thirty years.  I used to haul classes of mortuary science students twice a year to tour the cemetery (that was a labor in the vineyard I can tell you!), and then on my own made good friends with two of the cemetery superintendents as well as the talented horticulturalists, and I spent hours of private time walking the grounds of the cemetery and tracking down the graves of the rich and famous as well as the obscure citizens of the Queen City.  One rainy Saturday afternoon, after having spent several hours at Arnold’s Bar I traveled to Spring Grove and found the grave of undertaker Samuel Cobb, who was the predecessor of Schaefer and Busby Funeral Home and who in 1841 conducted the Cincinnati funeral of President William Henry Harrison.  For TVB those experiences are exhilarating.  

Spring Grove is not just a cemetery, far from it.  Spring Grove is, in an interesting way, a living presence attesting that the thousands upon thousands of lives have lived, and that they are now dead.  That idea sounds terribly simple but just apply that simple idea to the attitudes that people have today concerning death, and particularly their own death.  Death denial abounds with tremendous energy.  Death illiteracy has taken on a life of its own.  However, it is impossible, no matter how death denials try, to deny the reality of death when walking the grounds of Spring Grove. 

The vast and the word is vast, use of the 700 plus acres which comprise the developed and undeveloped sections of Spring Grove abound with highly visible monuments, and there are some magnificent monuments adorning the horticultural magnificence of this city for the dead, which is equally renowned as a world class arboretum.  

Today I suspect many might deplore the “expense” and “opulence” of such monumental masonry and architecture but I do not; most of these good people who bought these monuments have been dead a long long time, and I suspect that either the monument bill was paid or if it was not it has been written off as a bad debt by the monument company decades before you and I were even a glimmer in our father’s eye.  No, friends, I see something that goes way beyond mere money, yes now there is an idea, something beyond mere money, something of greater importance than mere money, something that money in the end cannot buy. I see, in the symbols, the sentiment, and the scenes and sensations that the world of Spring Grove represents the human experience of standing before the awesome presence of our neverending attempts to capture the mystery of death and what death means.  Our attempts in the quest end up being carved and written in granite and marble, in bronze and in sandstone. 

When I visit Spring Grove I believe that our attempts to grasp the meaning of the mysteries of death have some success – the purpose and mission of Spring Grove hit upon this.  Not with total success to be sure, but certainly we see and are given glimpses of connecting with the cemetery of what is waiting for us on the other side.  These are shadows of meaning in stone, but make no mistake, there is meaning to this grand effort on the part of human beings – the efforts are not wasted.

It is evident today that contemporary culture is showing clear signals that we might be still interested in glimpsing into what is on the other side, but we might not be using symbols and memorial architecture to help us get to that awareness, the way our ancestors did not too many years ago.  

Nothing lasts forever, except just possibly our cemeteries come as close as anything to our quest to have something we have created last forever.  Of course our cemeteries also die (and when they do the science of archeology is born), but it takes a long, long, long time for that death to happen.

In the meantime our precious and cherished rural cemeteries need visiting, need constant attention, need work, need support need the human touch, because when they get what they need the beneficiaries are the living human beings.  

Given a chance to live the old cemeteries and the new can teach valuable life lessons.  Anyway that has been this old undertaker’s experience in my fortunate connection with Spring Grove in the Queen City.

TVB

I just finished reading a short news clip concerning burying the dead with respect and dignity.  I read nothing new in this short article save for the fact that the author was a clergyperson associated with the Unitarian-Universalist Church.  Having been a Unitarian myself for years I found it interesting that a clergy of this particular denomination would even give the issue of treating the dead with respect and dignity a glance, let alone compose a short epistle on the subject.  Bravo – I personally thought it a breakthrough of sorts to have a leader in an extremely liberal religious movement, where many of the Memorial Societies in the country are located and who historically have promoted cremation and memorial services, to take up the torch that the dead deserve respect and dignity.  This clergyperson focused her outline on an examination of the seven corporal acts of mercy, the seventh being “burial of the dead.”

It would be a miracle if this clergyperson’s thoughts took hold in the mainstream, but hope springs eternal and concerning the care of the dead I have discovered, at times much to my chagrin and at times much to my own humor, that almost anything goes these day.  In fact I had a conversation with a buddy of mine yesterday conceiving the idea that what we could do next with cremated remains is load them up in empty shot gun shells, blast them into the sky, and gather the casings and get them bronzed and engrave the name of the deceased on the outside – and sell them.  I then discovered that once again my imagination is not that sharp, for a farmer in Iowa is already offering this type of service to his community – does death creativity and invention have any limits? 

Will Durant, the great Columbia University philosopher, once remarked that “religion is the last subject the intellectual tackles,” and so right was Mr. Durant.  If you want controversy just start talking religion and surely you will find the controversy you are looking for.  

However let’s tackle religion a bit concerning this haunting 7^th Corporal Act of Mercy – burial of the dead.  From the outset let me assure my associates and friends that I am not anti-cremation, and I recognize the foolishness of taking such a position in this period of death care history (but as any student of history knows the popularity of cremation will change over time).

With that disclaimer said let me state a few facts regarding the historical traditions of the Judeo-Christian tradition in regards to this 7^th Corporal Act of Mercy.  Historically the Christian church and the Jewish temple have basically been against cremation – it’s true.  Now of course this stance against has changed in a big way, but the history has not changed.

For years I have been told by not just a few people that funerals are “pagan.”  It is abundantly clear that those who pontificate such remarks have no clue as to the relationship of paganism and cremation.  It was the pagans, not the Jews or Christians who embraced cremation.  Throughout the history of Judaism and for most of Christian history cremation has been an extremely rare practice, and the early Christian believed firmly that cremation was not a wise decision, based on the following:

• Pagan cultures used cremation as a method to deny the reality of the Christian conception of a bodily resurrection and hence used the burning of a dead human being to mock the Christians belief in a bodily resurrection.  We need to remember that the dualism of body and soul is not a Christian concept, but it instead emerged in the Greek philosophies of Plato and Aristotle.  
• The Bible clearly teaches that the human body is the Temple of the Holy Spirit and cremation was viewed as an extremely destructive process as compared to earth burial.
• Jesus was not cremated.
• The early Christian equated fire with hell.
• Cremation caused practical problems even in the early period of Christianity in determining foul play and the cause of death.
• Cremation was formally prohibited by Constantine the Great, the first world leader to embrace Christianity.

In time the issue of cremation became so frustrating to the Roman Catholic Church that Pope Leo the XIII issued Canon Law #1203 which reads:  “The bodies of the faithful must be buried; cremation is forbidden.”  Then #1203 goes on to prohibit all Roman Catholics from joining memorial and/or cremation societies whose purpose according to the church is to deny the bodily resurrection.

On May 8, 1963, Pope Paul VI removed Canon Law #1203, and recently I was informed of the cremation of a Monsignor in the Roman Catholic Church.  Things have indeed changed.

However this history, while possibly interesting to some, does not address the 7^th Corporal Act of Mercy which was not removed by any council of the church; the concept is alive, but maybe not well.  “Burial of the Dead” continues to impact our culture and life, and when one stops and seriously ponders this act of mercy some sobering thoughts come into mind.

First the 7^th Corporal Act of Mercy does not say “Cremation of the Dead.”  It clearly states “Burial of the Dead.”  I think however what this really is saying has not so much to do with the method of final disposition – I mean what you have in a grave over a long time, you have in a crematory chamber in a very short time.  The implications must be of a deeper more thoughtful nature.

I think this 7^th Corporal Act of Mercy is a clear call to those of us who decided to devote our lives to the ethical care of the dead – regardless the method of disposition.  It falls, in a big way, to every funeral profession, embalmer, cemeterian, everybody involved with our great profession, to think out, practice, and instill the ethic of Reverence for the Dead in the minds, hearts, and nay souls of everybody involved with this terribly important work.

To be sure the family unit is fractured, and sometimes the very next of kin are not in the least concerned about what happens to Dad’s body – but that does not automatically mean that you and I should abandon our level of care, abandon the 7^th Corporal Act of Mercy – just because we are standing in the shadows of a disunited, disgruntled, disharmonious family unit.  No our work, our mission, our calling supersedes the agenda of any wacky family.

I have only to alert my associates and friends to the horrors of necrophilia, to the atrocities of the German concentration camps where millions of dead people were treated in a most repulsive manner, to the anguish that a family and community feels when a dead body cannot be found, to prove that someone has to be charged with the responsibility of maintaining the 7^th Corporal Act of Mercy, and my dear friends that charge falls to you and me.  This is a good profession to be involved with.

However one last question lingers in my mind and I will simply poise the question without any attempts at answers or analysis.  The Christian perspective is of a true bodily resurrection; the scripture writers do not separate the body and the soul as the Greeks did.  No one talks much about this, and the last time I taught this stuff in a Sunday School class, people who had chosen cremation for others and also themselves got mighty defensive and did not much like the historical background.

Still, whether it is popular, or even in our contemporary culture, rational, if the bodily resurrection is accurate, if the ancient teaching is true,  then the question can easily be raised: What is going to happen to all the hundreds of thousands of people who have been cremated?  I have found very few people interested in exploring this with me. Anybody in blog land have a thought or two?  I would be mighty interested.

Anyway that’s one old undertaker’s opinion.

 TVB