And this is why baptising other people's dead is bad.

"“You cannot rebuild a cemetery,” said local resident Chantal Bocchin. “It’s not worth rebuilding when there’s no one left.”"
https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-france-floods-cemetery-idUKKBN26R36U

But I can't argue with those here and the Mormon leaders who think that the dead are somehow theirs where there's no one left.

OMG! That's horrible!

I used to play near an old abandoned church. In the cemetery, people were buried under slabs.

Philly has several underground creeks. Some have been diverted, but some are still there.

If you stood just so near the church wall, you could hear running water. I wonder where the bodies are.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/08/2020 12:02AM by Beth.

The bodies are in the process of being embraced by Mother Nature. Interesting, an abandoned church with a cemetery. Love it. What a cool place to play. Where ghosts worship. The spaces and places of past people and their dramas. Like a ghost of a warm embrace cools to the bone and their dead keep the place full of people.

Mormonism has no poetic souls. It exchanged potential aesthetic in it for money. It made covenants with the devils of the dead and craves their souls for its mortal glories.

The church is in the background: https://parentinfantcenter.org/about/location-and-facilities

What a quaint village church it is!

Oh, it was pretty big https://www.philadelphiabuildings.org/pab/app/pj_display.cfm/66751

Oh wow - my old bedroom window is the third from the top and I think the 4th from the right. https://www.phillyhistory.org/PhotoArchive/Detail.aspx?assetId=30574

WOW! That looks old. Was/is it?

The apartment building I grew up in is in the background: https://www.phillyhistory.org/PhotoArchive/Detail.aspx?assetId=146657

The history of Lafayette Cemetery is such a tragedy:

http://thecemeterytraveler.blogspot.com/2011/12/condemned-lafayette-cemetery.html

The person contracted to move the cemetery dumped the 47,000 bodies into unmarked trenches; the gravestones - no one knows where they went.

Tyson

Fascinating. They used to find 19th Century markers garish? Wow. 47K bodies and caskets? Dang!

Yup. And Rittenhouse Square park and I think Washington Square park are potter's fields. There's prime real estate around those parks, lovely trees, and people picnic and sunbathe on the grass.

Super fertilizer

People putrify and earthbathe under the grass.

I am of the point of view that if you're going to 'save' human husks, ya gotta do the same for corn husks.

How was 'preserving' Stephen Hawkings' meager body of any use or value? Do we think less of those whose deaths include the complete loss or disintegration of their bodies?

Yes, I get that visiting a grave site may allow for a more precise focusing on the departed, but I've seen them become rote exercises in futility.

For every Napoleon, Ramses II, Alexander the Great there are tens of billions humans who gone from history and memory.

My thought is that at best, people die with some good memories in theirs and others' minds. What happens after that is an elective, not a requirement.

IMO...

elderolddog Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> IMO...

IMHO...

What about ancient people's bodies preserved? No benefits there?

I want to be cremated.

DNA has its usefulness not to mention the dignity of someone's remains. People will continue to plant their dead. It might even be a symptom of civilization. And then there is Mormonism. Necromancy was a part of Mormonism. Now they just need the names.

https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ensign/1987/08/the-alvin-smith-story-fact-and-fiction?lang=eng

There was a colonial-era cemetery near the house where I grew up. I used to love to wander around there, reading the gravestones. There were lots of early deaths of children and adults in those days, of course. Back then, it was not unusual to tell something about the person or their death on the gravestone, and sometimes what was told had a sense of humor to it. Or family members might have a favorite verse carved into the headstone. The headstones had personality!

What struck me most was that no headstone was immune to the ravages of time or weather. Some had crumbled or had broken in two. Many times the inscription was weathered away by rain and storms. I don't know if the headstones made today are any sturdier, but what I learned from that cemetery is that it is foolish to think that the average memorial will endure.

Wrong place.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/08/2020 03:13PM by Elder Berry.

The marble stones were partly dissolved by acid rain. The acid rain is not as much of a problem now. Granite stones held up much better. You are safe with granite. I’m a volunteer with a cemetery that started in 1838. Many of the old marble stones are unreadable now but the granite ones are clear and sharp.

Yup. I used to live near the Smithville, NJ burial ground - people broke and pushed over the head stones. Horrible.

A short drive from there is a burial ground for Black soldiers who served in the Civil War. I think they finally did something about preserving that one. It's in Pomona, NJ (I think). I don't remember there being markers.

My NJ family is buried in a segregated cemetery in Cape May Courthouse. I think it's Lincoln Cemetery. It's in poor condition. I think we're done burying people there, so soon we won't remember whose bodies are there.

I have relatives buried in the Black section in Greenwood Cemetery in Pleasantville, NJ. There are some graves of Jewish veterans in that section. You know the old VA headstones? Those are there.

Um, and I've been to the one in Renton, WA where Jimi Hendrix is buried. That's a very, very nice cemetery. The Jimi memorial is tacky AF, but the cemetery itself is lovely.

I try to find the oldest grave in cemeteries, and I try to imagine what that person saw while they were alive.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 10/08/2020 04:08PM by Beth.

Interesting. Good to know.

Dammit! I wish they hadn't used crema marfil for my headstone.

> I don't know if the headstones
> made today are any sturdier


I suspect that the artisans who make them know that they only have to outlast the people who paid for them.

And imagine if it was the deceased who pre-paid for everything! The artisans would probably give them all the guarantees in writing they wanted.

This week I received mail from a local funeral home about pre-paying for my funeral.

I took my pulse, and tossed it in the trash.

Some time in the late 50s I worked in a 6th floor office that overlooked a busy street close to St. Paul's Cathedral in London. The office overlooked the site of a building that had been destroyed in the London blitz of WW2. The site had been cleared for use as a parking lot but it was decided to build a new high rise office there that would be taller than the one destroyed, which would mean digging a much deeper foundation than the previous building.

Pretty soon work came to a screeching halt when they hit a burial group, possibly a plague pit dug close to the cathedral. The building site had a high fence around it but from office high above we had a clear view of the masses of human bones being dug out that filled many of those huge buckets used in construction or were piled in mounds. Since it was considered consecrated ground work stopped until all remains were removed and reinterred elsewhere.

Sounds like something from Hieronymus Bosch.

You mean Bosch was going to figure out how they died?

That's right, Harry.

"Bring outchur dead!"

This is why they have been baptizing central american statues