Three days before Christmas may not be the time to comment on winter funerals, but I’m seeing a lot of them at the cemetery near my house this week, and we’ve also just had a very moving candlelight vigil for the area homeless people who have died this year, four of whom were in our care at the hospice, so the hard reality of coping with holiday loss is on my mind. Down at the seminary where I’m training for ordination, we’ve even been putting together practice burial liturgies. How’s that for timing!
You’ll know, if you know me, that I’m interested in the continuities in spirituality between our generation and the ones before us. I’ve found a rich source for understanding the Victorians’ way of managing the loss of people they loved. It belongs to the Friends of Oak Grove Cemetery, a curated historical site in Fall River, Massachusetts. And I found my way to it accidentally, by reading the touching story of a woman's rescue of a three-year-old's coffin which had lain beneath her house since 1871. The UK’s Daily Mail reports that one Ericka Karner, of San Francisco, was told of the coffin's existence by workmen, who reckoned it was a leftover from a big cemetery clearance that once made way for new housing. The city wouldn't claim the little body, so she did, with the help of the Garden of Innocence Foundation in Fresno, who bury unidentified children. They name them, they have the Boy Scouts build lace-lined caskets for them, and they lay them to rest with blankets and soft toys; their funerals are well attended, by policemen, by military personnel, by parents who have lost children of their own. It is clear, said the Garden's founder, Elissa Davey, that the child in this very beautiful coffin was loved, and she says, 'We will love her too.' Mrs. Karner's daughters have named her Miranda, and she is to be reburied very shortly. One of the reasons I love the Victorians is that they loved children. Miranda's little casket was an elegant thing, curvy, with two panes of glass (which I'd never heard of before this) that displayed the child in a long, white dress, with lavender in her still-blonde hair, holding a rose. The workmen who found her were quite moved. So was I, by her apparent back-story and by the care our own generation has been showing for her. I went looking for more on the intersection between us and the Victorians on the sad matter of children's deaths, and found this beautiful Oak Grove blog. Its touch is very gentle, and it's got everything the historian could want, without heaviness or morbidity. There are pages about burial customs, mourning fashions, poetry, and superstitions. I'd not known about maiden garlands -- see the picture above: did little Miranda's sisters bear these before her cortege? I hope so. That picture, by the way, is what a winter funeral procession looked like in the 1870s on the little harbour by our old house in Edinburgh. There are posts in the website about curiosities like the city’s 'holding tomb,' and for heaven's sake, transcripts of the Lizzie Borden murder victims' autopsies, which I gather happened there. There is a great blogroll of other sites -- there's apparently a National Museum of Funeral History and an Association for Gravestone Studies. It's all good reading, and it's a wonderful, warm-hearted place to go if you like to be around Victorians, and compare the ways you cope with untimely death with the ways they did.