Better Than Dead

Eighty years ago on this day, William Butler Yeats transitioned from the earthly realm to wherever mystic poets go when they die. He was in the south of France at the Hôtel Idéal Séjour in Roquebrune Cap Martin, kept company by both his wife George and his last mistress, Edith Shackleton Heald. His friends had taken up a collection to help him move there.

Yeats completed Cuchulain Comforted in the last fifteen days of his life, a poem Seamus Heaney referred to as “one of the greatest ever death-bed utterances.” He completed his last play, The Death of Cuchulain, just before New Years’ day. And he handed over the manuscript of two poems, Are You Content? and The Spirit Medium to his mistress as he lay dying.

He asked George to bury him at the local cemetery in Roquebrune and expressed a wish that after a year’s time she arrange to have him dug up and his body moved to Sligo. Unfortunately, due to an unfortunate combination of misconstrued burial instructions and the beginning of World War II, the poet’s wishes were not carried out as planned. Somehow, he wound up in a pauper’s grave with many other bodies. Because he wore a leather truss for a hernia, they thought they might be able to identify his body, and so in 1948 the attempt was made. And this is where things get even more muddled. An English gentleman, Alfred Hollis, who wore a surgical steel corset for his spine died two weeks after Yeats and was interred in the same plot. A body wearing a medical device was exhumed by French authorities. This body was conveyed with great honor to Galway harbor. Friends and family measured and examined the bones and insisted it was Yeats. But who is in Yeats’ tomb? To this day some say an Englishman resides in it—but both the Yeats and Hollis families found the whole thing so painful they decided to leave things as they were.

I would refer you to this fine article from The Irish Times, written on the 75th anniversary of Yeats’ death and from which I gleaned this information—and so much more. A great read.

You can read the entire Cuchulain Comforted here.

They sang, but had nor human tunes nor words,
Though all was done in common as before;
They had changed their throats and had the throats of birds.

1. Let me thread you a story… (1-16)
2. Sam Hotchkiss is the caretaker down to Shady Groves Cemetery. Sam says as how he likes his job, walking through the quiet and peace,
3. making sure the residents are happy. Most enjoy the peace as much as Sam. Any that don’t tend not to stay in Shady Groves.
4. They get up and wander ‘round town and sometimes have to be dealt with by Madame Nimby and her son Rupert.
5. Others just wander the streets taking in the sights, seeing what old friends and family are up to.
6. Wanderin’ gets old after awhile—and takes a passel of energy. When they dissipate enough of that restless mojo they go back
7. to Shady Groves and their sod beds, wrap their grass blankets back around themselves, and rest eternal.
8. Sam takes particular care of the children there. He feels bad they got cut off so young and didn’t have a chance to live long and prosper.
9. He likes to leave marbles by their graves so they can have a game now and then. Used to leave stuffed animals, too,
10. but they tended to get soggy when it rained and the kids didn’t care for ‘em much after that.
11. Electronic games don’t work for similar reasons. ‘Sides, it’s difficult for the kids to maintain corporeal fingers long enough to swipe and tap.
12. They do enjoy a nice game of hide n’ seek, sometimes with Sam, sometimes with each other.
13. Ain’t rightly fair when they play with Sam, though. If he gets too close to finding them, they can just go invisible.
14. That trick don’t work with each other—spirits can always see other spirits—but Sam is a mere mortal, after all.
15. Them kids laugh and laugh when Sam seeks and seeks and never finds. “Play fair, you kids!” he’ll call out to them.
16. But mostly he’s laughing when he says it. Can’t blame kids for having a good time.

This tale can also be found on Twitter @downportalville.
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Random quote of the day:

“Death must be so beautiful. To lie in the soft brown earth, with the grasses waving above one’s head, and listen to silence. To have no yesterday, and no to-morrow. To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.”

—Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Random quote of the day:

“Hollywood is a place where they’ll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul.”

—Marilyn Monroe, My Story

 

 A personal memory

Every time I’ve visited Marilyn’s grave—and given that I worked in Westwood when I was younger, it’s been quite often—there are fresh flowers and the imprint of red lips on the stone. Westwood Memorial Cemetery persists in cleaning them off, but fans persist in leaving them, and even after Joe DiMaggio stopped having roses delivered weekly to Marilyn’s grave (for some twenty years), the fans also kept up that tradition. I last visited her in 1993. Although we buried my dad, Tom, at the veteran’s cemetery in Riverside, his memorial service was held at Westwood. I stepped out for air at one point and wandered the grounds, eventually going over to say hello to Marilyn. The flowers and red lips were in place, as always. As I turned back to the memorial chapel I saw my dad standing outside in the Marine Corps dress blues we’d buried him in—looking sad, his hat in his hands. He glanced up, our eyes met, he acknowledged me with a nod, then he was gone.

 

 

Disclaimer:  The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Random quote of the day:

“The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.”

—George Eliot, Middlemarch

(Thanks to sartorias for this quote.)

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this random quote of the day do not necessarily reflect the views of the poster, her immediate family, Siegfried and Roy, Leonard Maltin, or the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. They do, however, sometimes reflect the views of the Cottingley Fairies.

Those of you who have been reading my Livejournal blog for awhile may remember this story, but as it’s mysterious and happened to me, I thought it worth posting again.

In June of 2005 I decided to visit Woodlawn Cemetery on 14th and Pico in Santa Monica, California. Not a huge cemetery, surrounded by urban blight on three of its four sides and a junior college on the fourth, but a beautiful place inside the grounds.  A number of old, gnarled, and interesting trees are scattered throughout the graveyard, and since it was established in the nineteenth century it has a wide range of dates on the headstones.

I’ve liked walking through cemeteries since I was quite young (morbid child that I am), and I’d been to Woodlawn often back in the day.  I also used it in one of my novels (Shivery Bones), dredged up from memory.  I decided to return to see if my memory had gotten things right, and also to take some pictures with my (then) new camera. Because the sun was so bright, the sky so blue, the trees so plentiful, I got lots of shadow-and-light shots. The headstones held many poignant stories, too—heartbreak and mysteries, brief lives, some nearly a century old. I doubt anyone knows the story behind the words on those stones anymore, probably not even the folks who keep the cemetery records.

One story that has always intrigued me centers around two small markers over by the western fence (but on this picture you’ll have to click on the picture and go to Photobucket to see the full picture because WordPress keeps cutting it off):

No dates, no other graves nearby, just these two little headstones. My imagination has always roamed a great deal over what story might lie behind the starkness of these two little markers.

The next night as I went through the pictures, I discovered another little mystery. I like to view all the pictures in super blow up, quadrant by quadrant. Partly that’s because sometimes a piece of a photo will be more interesting than the entire shot; partly because I like to look for anomalies. My favorite shot of the set was a shadow and light picture of a child’s grave. And that was the beginning of the mystery:

The small mystery…
(more…)