There are so many pretty things in a cemetery. So, why was I taking a picture of some scat?

My friend, Michelle, and I, it was turning out, have more in common than just our relationships with Congressional Cemetery. On our first visit to a new cemetery together, Michelle LaFrance, as an ethnographer, and I, as a death doula, were reading more than the epitaphs. For both of us, the trees, the soil, and the wildlife were not just a visual landscape for memorialization: they were the drama of life, decomposition, and nourished rebirth.

We read the memorials and we read the ecology that they reside within. We had questions.

Human bodies are laid to rest in a construction zone: microbial jackhammers, root pressure circulation, and rhizospheric conversations. We entered the cemetery gates where everything living has a job and the labor goes on in overlapping shifts. Night and day: the minerals weather, nematodes wage war, and we occasional humans wander through as if we are writing the plot and we are the actors in every scene.

“Where’s that dragonfly coming from?” Michelle mused. She was alerted to how close we must be to a water source by the insect life.

“I do not understand this poop,” said I.

This kind of earthy curiosity does seems to run in deathy circles. I recently paused a conversation with a deathy friend to sidebar on their reference to mycelium to describe human relationships with the divine*. We deathier folks will helpfully explain to you the role of oxygen and moisture in what is left of a body after the first year after a green burial. If you ask, and we hope you do, we will describe the color and texture of the ashes from water cremation, over dinner. These are the kinds of richly curious people I get to know.

You don’t mind that I digress, right? But you were hoping I would get to the cemetery visit.

It was Glenwood. Actually, from above, where all the birds we heard that day were, there were three DC burial grounds: Glenwood, Saint Mary’s, and Prospect Hill. Glenwood is the largest of these contiguous properties, and boasts 55,000 happy customers. Contiguous, but not related or mutually accessible: each cemetery has its own entrance gate and fences. We could see Prospect Hill from the two others, but I saved visiting there for a future visit: it was hot. One must allot enough drinking water, heat tolerance, and bladder capacity for each site visit. As a bus rider, going to places rarely boasting of a restroom and none of a coffee shop, these cemetery visits are more like rural hikes than city destinations.

The paths of Glenwood are winding and the graves follow the curves, which is meaningful in cemetery history: it was designed in the “rural cemetery” era, not the squared off east-west placement of earlier burial grounds. Glenwood has features and neighborhoods. A circle of statuary at the entrance. A breezy gazebo and landscaped scattering garden. A cinematic hill of mausoleums.

We, too, wandered organically, without a brochure or a list of people to visit. We looked in, literally, on an open grave awaiting its reservee. We listened for birds, but it being DC, there were also plenty of helicopters, which Michelle called our “state bird.” We took cooling refuge under mature trees to extend our time, then we moved on to St. Mary’s next door, a smaller property with a more formal layout. We both spotted a grand zinker at the same time, as she knows my mania for them.

We ate our sandwiches in a quiet, shaded spot. She brought cool chips and cooler waters. I brought a whimsical trio of the identical sandwich, cut diagonally, with varying levels of crust: peanut butter and apple slices with honey and cinnamon. These side-by-side burial grounds invited comparison. We noted the difference between St. Mary’s memorials and Glenwood’s, one of specific faith and community, and one mixed. One seemingly all in English, the other notably mixed languages. Cemeteries can be a meditation on origins and ends, and it was good to see the specifics and the contrasts on the same day. It is very good to do so with someone who seeks meaning and notes patterns like Michelle.

We were almost, that day, as watchful of the trees and plantings as we were the evidence of the people buried and mourning. We spoke of plants without roots, insects with and without wings. We ran into few other humans at either cemetery, but I was delighted to learn about Michelle’s crop of edible mushrooms this year, and I admired her vividly colored photos of lichens. I invited her to visit my new moss experiments at our rowhome back patio. We marvelled at the etchings of nature on the memorial stones: the fungi and algae that collaborate with water and air pollution to erase human names and dates. We identified and named trees by their leaves, grasses by shape, and shrubbery: signs of maintenance that require long-term strategy. We noted what was missing: we saw few downed branches or invasive plants. Sometimes cemetery maintenance is done invisibly, on long timelines.

We came upon an extraordinary statue carved from a large tree snag, but my phone ran out of battery strength and I did not get a pic, Michelle shared hers. Later, I learned there were originally more of these chainsaw art pieces but, as organic pieces, nature had taken all but that one down. Tree snags are grave markers of old growth, habitat for living things, and are busy at all times becoming earth again. These great old trees were carved into human art as they made their way back to earth and we got to witness a last phase. All of us mortal, all travelling through, being made use of in different forms for a time.

Bonus content below. Read on at your own risk, after you are done eating.

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I kept wondering about the poop. Or rather, scat.

Listen, I have lived in the country, I married a hunter and fisherman, and in an earlier life I earned a Master’s in Wildlife Biology, but I had never seen scat like this. I won’t show you the video unless you ask me, it involves flies, but I found it fascinating. It was the wrong shape, texture, size, and color for anything I could identify: large, slick, all in one piece, black, with many seeds, atop a sable reduction sauce of some kind.

Large enough to be from a bear, I thought, but in the middle of the city, as Michelle pointed out, there would probably have been chatter about that sighting. And yes, I google-checked myself, which is where I learned that the cartoonist who originated the “Teddy Bear” is buried at Glenwood, you’re welcome.

Raccoon was my first hypothesis because there were copious seeds in this memorial to digestion, but it seemed too big an … achievement… for a raccoon. And: the edges were not “blunt or broken” which I just learned is another clue for spotting raccoon scat.

Oh, good, you’re still here. Michelle and I were also undaunted. But, to be sure: we did not touch it. Do not touch animal droppings. Raccoon poop can be particularly dangerous. Oh, did you know that raccoons do their business in what wildlife biologists call “latrines?” These kinds of details are why you are still here, I’m sure.

Deer was the obvious suspect. ”It does not look like it is from a deer,” I said, feeling myself safely experienced in that department.

Michelle mentioned, as we meandered, a story she recently heard from a deer-hunting friend. The distracting item on the paved path fit the size and shape description she had heard about scat from rutting deer bucks: a solid single mass rather than a scattering of small pellets, in a solitary spot. On probing this mystery later, (not the scat!) I learned more about this phenomenon, and it made the placement far from any other visible scat, and the shape and lack of little pellets make sense.

But still: the black puddle around it. I think I know why. I was looking for a single answer, and it was more complicated: our visit to Glenwood that day was a welcome bright day after over a week of spring rain so exhausting to the DC area that it was how we greeted one another on the street for an additional week: “How about that rain, right?”

All that rain and the fact that deer in early spring briefly shift their diet to take advantage of “high moisture vegetation may explain the sighting. Nature oversupplied a seasonal treat. We may have been seeing a lush portrait of seasonal dyspepsia.

My hypothesis is: springtime buck deer, in rut, with unexpected amounts of spring greens. Other thoughts welcome.

Some people read the room. Reading a graveyard takes more than text recognition.

_{*Respect due to D.U.}

As a death doula, I am free to serve whomever I wish. At my own deathbed, I expect to choose those who sit with me. Not everyone has a choice to serve, or to be cared for.

This is a letter I sent recently:

Hello, DC Death Collective community,

It means a great deal to me personally to invite you to a documentary viewing and panel discussion of interest to many of us in the dying and death community.

AN IDEA FROM A MEMBER

In April, a DCDC supporting member approached me with an idea: to have a screening here in DC of an Oscar-nominated short documentary about incarcerated hospice volunteers. Jackie Bolduan, end-of-life doula, did not yet know how much it meant to me to get that request. I cleared my desk and she and I got to work.

WHY IT FEELS PERSONAL

I never met my grandfather. He spent much of his life in jail or prison; even as a young teenager. When I think of incarceration, I think of the contrast between the two photos I have of him: one a handsome smiling man wearing the heck out of great fedora, the other the mug shot in his San Quentin records.

The DC Jail shares a border wall with Congressional Cemetery and I live nearby. As I volunteer and walk the cemetery grounds I think about the incarcerated people on the other side of the wall, and the complicated issues around justice hidden behind the walls.

COLLABORATION TO BRING THIS FILM HERE

Jackie and I have both seen the film, and we agreed we wanted to share it with DCDC and the larger community to raise awareness and connect advocates. We have worked with the Humane Prison Hospice Project and the film’s director to arrange the screening and a panel discussion with the director. We have also collaborated with DCDC and with Congressional Cemetery as partners.

WHY IT MATTERS TO THE DCDC COMMUNITY

For those of us who serve dying people, and tend grievers, the topic of incarcerated people’s end of life is personal. Allowing incarcerated people to serve the dying, as we are able to do, is something we can advocate for, and this is an opportunity to better understand the complex issues around the topic together.

This is your special notice of the free screening scheduled for July 16 at 6:30pm at the Congressional Cemetery chapel. Capacity in the chapel is limited, so if you are available and want to join us, please reserve today.

I am grateful to DCDC for the opportunity to collaborate with Jackie to bring this film to DC and to host a conversation about HPHP’s work to bring these programs to prisons. Perhaps even here in our area. Let’s get the conversation going together?

CLICK HERE FOR RESERVATIONS. Registration required.

Thank you to all who are working together on this,

Laura

Laura Lyster-Mensh, DCDC Steering Committee

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I meet a lot of Lauras lately. In the past few weeks I took a writing class from a Laura, accepted an invite to a graveyard tour led by a Laura, and shared some sandwiches with yet another Laura at Eldbrooke Methodist Cemetery.

Naming is a recurring theme today, so I will note that the latter Laura taught me that “Eldbrooke” is a portmanteau combining the names of two church founders.*

Recently, some mean kids made a list of “Old Lady Names” that included the name Laura. Bless their hearts. In 40 years, Liam and Olivia, you too will be hazed by your littles.

Cemeteries are, mostly, names. Anything more than a name and two dates is expensive: carving on stone is charged by the letter. A stroll in a cemetery is a walkable N-gram of name popularity. (I’ll wait while you go look at the chart for your own given name)

“Laura” peaked in 1969, apparently, which tracks: there are a lot of Lauras in my age cohort. Last night someone sang out the first bar of the jazz standard, “Laura” when we met. He was my parents’ age.

The name Helen had its best years between 1900 and 1930, but the “BABY HELEN” whose gravestone Laura showed me at Eldbrooke is memorialized in capital letters by first name only: no date, just her tragic state of infancy. “Baby Helen” is listed on the cemetery’s list of interments with no further detail, just the foot and inch coordinates for where she can be found. Her parents and community surely needed no more identifiers or facts as long as they lived.*

Laura Otolski, my sandwich partner that day, works in the Iona Senior Services office in a building overlooking the Eldbrooke churchyard and looks in on Baby Helen on her way to the office.

I arrived at her office early and took the opportunity to attend Iona’s death cafe, facilitated by Dixcy Bosley. Although I often facilitate death cafes, sometimes even I just need a meeting. It seemed fitting to sit with strangers to talk openly about death before spending time in a cemetery. The cookies were thoughtfully chosen. The tea was calming. The conversation was as well. Sweetness and warmth are central to the death cafe model.

Each cemetery visit is specific: the weather, the time of day, and the companion. We two Lauras share certain perspectives and interests: both death doulas, both transplants to DC, both members of the DC Death Collective. She knows Eldbrooke cemetery from all angles and conditions, and she opened the gates to show me around.

Strictly speaking, Eldbrooke Cemetery is a graveyard, where humans are interred alongside a church, on church property. The Methodist church next to the graveyard was built in 1926, was first called Mount Zion Methodist Church, then Eldbrooke, and is now the Citizen Heights Church. The cemetery itself also retains at least a few other titles: Methodist Cemetery and Tennallytown Cemetery. My spreadsheet of cemetery names has a column for “other names” and it gets a lot of use.

Most cemeteries are easiest to learn about on Findagrave, but Eldbrooke’s 564 former Washingtonians have one of the best and perhaps the most loving websites for a cemetery I’ve encountered. The residents and their legacies are centered on the grounds and in the documentation. This is a place of modest, well-cared-for memorials, maintained by the descendants of the cemetery's twelve original founders. There is very little ornamentation and even the epitaphs are brief. Although these were prominent early DC families, there is nothing braggy or showy about the way they chose to be remembered.

I looked forward to sharing with you the tidy symmetry I read about that that burials on the site began in 1847 and the last was 100 years later: 1947. But, of course, it is complicated. The cemetery was used but not established officially until 1855, and there are a few burials on the grounds that go up to 2006. The saddest complication to tidy dating is this: Eldbrooke was very near Fort Reno during the Civil War, and the grounds became a wartime resting spot. Memorials were disturbed. Some burials lost their markers and others were not recorded. When walking a cemetery we see only the surface, and only the markers that remain.

It is still a family place. There was evidence not only of caring groundskeeping but of recent family visitors. Specific graves have recent flowers.

The trees of Eldbrooke, too, are stately and mature. Their shade adds to the sense of gracious reflection. I understand why Laura invited me, and what a gift it is, nestled quietly between a neighborhood side street and an alley, a bit of a hidden treasure for the neighboring buildings and homes. Even the gates are conserved: a retired gate, now replaced, has a place of honor on the maintenance shed.

I liked being there with a friend who appreciates cemeteries. Not all deathcare people are taphophiles, and not all taphophiles are involved with deathcare. Laura is the kind of cemetery visitor who seeks stories in the stones, their placement, and the clues that connect different people’s stories. I appreciated how she is particularly attentive to reading and interpreting dates. We noticed that family groups were often laid in rows, not marked-off family plots.

Since our visit I am more attentive to footstones, as there were more there than in most cemeteries. Footstones give a sense of the whole person’s space, paired with a headstone. I wondered why some footstones faced the body, and some nearby faced away. (Ideas welcome.)

Another mystery: What do you think these items below might be? We had theories, but I wonder if someone out there might have an answer?

Eldbrooke is a formal graveyard: the plots seem to be nearly all on the same axis, the headstones facing northeast, oriented to the line of the road. There are no benches or ornamental spaces: we shared our sandwiches (smooth peanut butter and apple again) on the steps of the church outside.

This walk at Eldbrooke was the first DC cemetery where someone literally opened the gates for me to welcome me in. Thank you, Laura, and each of you who are walking in cemeteries with me this year.

Would you like to be on my list of people to receive the remaining list of unvisited cemeteries, and schedule a visit with me? I am about half way through, as we reach the mid-point in the year. Email me at Laura@LMWriter.com with subject line “What’s the Sandwich?”

_{*Aquila Eld and Philip Brooke}

_{*I grew curious and tried to discover little Helen’s full name. I am pretty sure I found her. If you are curious, I am willing to share. Just email me at Laura@LMWriter with the subject line: “Baby Helen” But keep in mind the story is of someone’s young child and the specific knowledge may make it more real and heavy. Ancestry.com is a Pandora’s box. If I have the right Helen, I discovered a grave at Congressional Cemetery, near my own future spot, related to Helen’s family.}

Sometimes a gravestone isn’t stone.

If you walk with me at Congressional Cemetery, I can turn you into a zinker expert. These metallic markers are magic: you do not notice them until you do, and then you get a thrill each time you spot a new one. Come close: I will point out the distinctly bluish tone and the fine seams, and then I will ask you to gently knock on the side; you will smile to discover it is hollow. Then, as we walk, I will pause and ask you to scan all the stones around us: immediately, you recognize the zinkers. They were right there, but now you become a person who pulls out their phone to send me pictures of zinkers you discover at other cemeteries. Thank you. My personal treasure hunter service.

Today, instead of walking you through a new cemetery I visited, I made you a virtual cemetery on Findagrave of the zinkers I know of at Congressional, which includes their coordinates, but I bet if you use my map below you’ll soon spot them easily by their blue tone just by being near them. You are going to become the Cliff Clavin* of your friend group, spitting facts and figures about their elaborate decorations and how the wartime need for metal during WWI collapsed the market and the opportunity to democratize graveyard history was lost.

Zinkers were not called that by the makers and marketers: they were sold by travelling sales agents under the name “white bronze.” And marketed they were. Mostly from a single company called Monumental Bronze Company of Bridgeport, Connecticut. They are also called zinkies. Either nickname can be spelled with a c, and often are. They are found all over the country. Websites are devoted to them. So am I.

Zinkers tell a story about burial customs. Their slice of funereal fame went from after the Civil War until the First World War. Zinkers enabled people with fewer means to tell stories of their loved ones with detail and flourishes because they are lightweight, molded with almost countless words and emblems, were shipped flat, and were far less expensive than stone to create, ship, and install. This was their downfall as well: they lost favor for being declasse. Just as caskets from Costco disrupted the funeral home business, so did zinkers, for a time.

Zinkers also keep their stories intact because they last: as distinct and readable memorials, unlike many of the stone monuments around them that spall and sugar into empty stone facades.

For your deathy trivia notes, you will love telling people that zinkers are said to “creep.” Temperature makes them shuffle a bit as they expand and contract. I like the idea that they are resilient and active, in their way, they do not go gently into their good cemetery nights.

Fact check: the story goes that zinkers were used during Prohibition to conceal cash to be swapped for moonshine. It is my understanding that this is apocryphal lore, and I know by repeating it that I shall only carry on the myth and that no one minds. All I can say is I can find no confirmation or counterevidence. But when you find your first zinker you will imagine the metal knobs being turned and metal plate moved aside, the hollow inside revealed, the jittery footsteps fading away. Still, I suspect more alcohol was involved with the story than clandestine commerce.

I have stumbled upon, or been shown, seven zinkers at Congressional Cemetery so far. The more people I tell, the more pictures I am sent. Keep them coming. I made a map in progress for you.

Being able to fit so much onto a grave marker, with very little in the way of editorial constraint, meant the zinkers could include a lot of information and personality. Which brings me to the fantastical zinker of Edmund F. Brown. It is blue, but it is all about Mr. Brown. A story in four facets.

Let me tell the story I see here, and why I believe the hero is not Edmund Brown, but Lucinda Simpson. She was the third wife and winner: the actual widow of Edmund Brown. With the no-extra-charge lettering, she told us everyone’s relationship with Edmund, but as the person who survived to tell the tale, Lucinda showed who she was.

Edmund’s first wife, Isabella, died young but was fully represented: her children and her relations were included in the family plot and she was named twice to make it clear why the Waters side is there.

The second wife, too, named and numbered with daughter and granddaughter: Elizabeth McDaniel’s side of the zinker.

Edmund himself outlived all the above but this is a Zinker so it was Lucinda who decided to give each wife a side, with their maiden names.

Lucinda lived until she was 101, decades after the rest of those in the family plot had died. She lived long enough to purchase a Zinker and include everyone’s names and origins. Zinker panels could be re-ordered with new information but it all feels contemporaneous to end with Lucinda. I think Lucinda had it made and wrote the copy that explains every relationship as emanating from her husband, a Notary Public, in fact, a person whose business was certifying names.

It’s all there on the stone: Lucinda was born before the rest, and died last. Her lifespan included her husband’s birth and the births and deaths of his two other wives.

History may be written by the victors, but sometimes the victor is very, very kind. Lucinda gave them all their honorable memorial, their equal sides. She remains “3rd Wife and Widow” of Edmund as long as the zinc lasts.

There are four sides and four surnames: Owen, Waters, McDaniel, and Brown. But no Simpson, because Lucinda got to be the Brown to tell the tale. The final say from the final wife who was a widow longer than any of them were wives. She was widowed just two years into her marriage but what a story she left for us all, if we stop and read it.

And I hope you do.

*No, it really is Cliff Clavin, not Clyde Claben, which is perhaps the best trivia fact ever, but I just learned that when looking for a link for the age-challenged. If you are too tired to click, he was a character from Cheers, where being a know-it-all at the bar was the equivalent of “Hey, Siri”

Some people make a face when I tell them about this project. YOU are not making faces. YOU, friends, get it. You are literally stepping forward. The invitations to meet at cemeteries, the leads on how to visit certain places, the sandwiches! I am SO busy meeting y’all at DC cemeteries I have not been reporting in real time. (will report on earlier visits soon.)

It is time to back up and tell you where we stand on the cemeteries visited so far. To “show the sandwiches.” Time to share the baffling but firm rules I have decreed, and then I sometimes change.

One rule, setting a year limit, is pretty typically me: I like a yearlong goal. I’ve done them before, even in public. Sandwiches in Cemeteries seemed doable in a year in DC, where nearly everything is accessible by public transport. If you know me you know I love a Metrobus.

My first task was to make a list of all the cemeteries, which was not as easy as it sounds. How do you define a cemetery? Is it the legal property? Is it a continguous burial ground? Does a columbarium count? Does a church with bodies buried inside constitute a cemetery? Must the bodies be in the ground, or can they be entombed? How many bodies does a burial ground make?

I made choices:

• Locations with at least 10 people’s remains

• Memorials without remains are everywhere in DC, but I’m not as interested in them. Weird.

• Outdoor: yes

• Yes to: interred or inurned and entombed, full body and cremated remains, and partial bodies

• The site must be considered a place of human rest: with a sign or a plaque or memorial

What do these rules leave out? Personal or institutional burials, like the Dumbarton Oaks Garden that holds the ashes of the founders, who were named Bliss. I’m saving pet cemeteries for a special round. The cemeteries I visit will have to be accessible to visitors, or visible from the road.

As mentioned earlier, I am saving a separate list of all the places in DC where people were buried and then “removed” and the site is magically no longer recognized as a burial site. (That’s a lie. These are still burial grounds, of course. What was moved was not the burial. In so many cases it was not even the remains. In most of these situations these were inconveniently poor decedents languishing in the way of real estate values. These lies and disrespects are too important to mix with marked burial grounds.)

I’m also holding on my plan to acknowledge the profoundly problematic: people whose bodies found their way to the holdings of local museums. When Findagrave finds itself at the Smithsonian, in other words.

(This is distinct from the ethical donation of our bodies to science. I have met quite gleeful future donors to a Body Farm, for example, or offering one’s former body to medical research or training. I myself have a card in my wallet directing my family to have my skull cracked open right after death to deliver my brain to Harvard: to offer other brains data to save yet other brains. While I am still using my cranium, I will apply it to how to honor the unasked for final dispositions above with respect. That is death doula work of a different gravity and space.)

There are also a few DC cemeteries that are private or the government involved does not offer public access. I will reach out to request permission to visit. I may be asking you for your help.

So far, here’s the 14 where I’ve been for this project this year, on my own or with others, in this order:

Georgetown University Jesuit Cemetery on my own, PB on busy bread

Reflection Park (yes, I know, not in DC, but I was invited by my friend, L., for a tour there one day, thank you, L), the sammie was PB on busy bread split four ways with L, A, & S

Congressional Cemetery with E, what sandwich was that, E?? I think it might have been some trail mix. Improvisation is important.

Mount Zion Cemetery and Oak Hill Cemetery with M, B & R, Mark made 1) bagel with cream cheese, bacon and spinach 2) Brie, apple, walnuts, and pomegranate molasses on ciabatta 3) there may have been a third equally delicious options

Washington Hebrew Congregation Cemetery, Adas Israel Cemetery, Elesavetgrad Cemetery, Ohev Sholom Congregation Cemetery with K & L, Ciabatta bread with provolone, applewood Genoa salami (peppered) and olive bruschetta, then some PB and apple and honey and cinnamon, and also a few salami and provolone with mustard.

Mount Olivet Cemetery on my own, with PB and apple on busy bread, so predictable

Woodlawn Cemetery with M, homemade meatloaf sandwiches with cold ginger ale

Glenwood Cemetery & Saint Marys Catholic Cemetery with M, PB and apple on country white bread in three versions (with crust, crust cut off, and one with a heel on top) and she brought chips and sparkly waters

Eldbrooke Methodist Cemetery with L. PB and apple slices with cinnamon on country white.

That leaves, by my rules above: 7 that I plan to visit as soon as possible and 14 I am still evaluating, so the numbers above are evolving. There are more for you to come to with me, for sure, just ask!

To be clear: I am looking for people to visit cemeteries with. You, yourself, actually, reading this. These offers are welcome and so appreciated. It is sublime to meet, share a sandwich, to learn these important places of remembrance with those who appreciate them. This is not just a walk in a park, or a spooky lark. This is death awareness, DC awareness, the genealogy of a city, a connection with our elders’ elders’ elders. Sometimes I go to a cemetery twice, just because I’m asked. I’m leaving in a moment to do just that, today.

I am overjoyed to share the list of unvisited sites in case you want to join me at one. I’m not publishing the dates and times in advance to allow me to be flexible for weather and to keep some scrap of mystery and magic. And awe.

My friend, the writer Cindy Brookshire, points out that I have not been showing the sandwiches. For shame. Delighted to show my work.(actually, usually, Mark’s work, to be honest)

When I made my initial list of cemeteries in the District of Columbia, I figured I would fit my visits in whenever I was free. It did not occur to me that the cemeteries might not all have time for me. Fortunately, my friend, Kurt, alerted me that Woodlawn Cemetery’s gates open this year only on Emancipation Day, Memorial Day, Juneteenth, Labor Day, and Veterans Day. I immediately chose Memorial Day: it was the soonest opportunity.

Mark offered to drive. He prepared a leftover homemade meatloaf sandwich for us to share, with a cold can of ginger ale, and we set out.

You may have guessed, from the list of days Woodlawn is open to the public, that it is a historically African American cemetery, and you are correct. You may not have guessed, especially if you have seen pictures of this serene hillside cemetery, that it is one of the most populated cemeteries in DC. What appears to be a sparsely occupied space is richly, lovingly, abundantly filled. It is the 4th-largest cemetery in DC, as far as burials. As you enter you definitely will not guess there are even more ghosts across the street where Payne’s Cemetery was literally dug up and tens of thousands of bodies moved out of the District, or left unmarked. The hallowed grounds around us that morning cradled nearly the same number of interred as in all of Congressional Cemetery, where I volunteer.

Former Washingtonians: Woodlawn 36,000, Payne 30,000, Congressional 67,000.

You cannot see where each body was interred at Woodlawn: memorial stones are scarce. Most never had permanent memorials, many markers have been displaced, and a good many more are low in the high grasses.

“We’re just lucky to still be here”* said Anntoinette “Toni” White-Richardson as she welcomed those of us waiting, unlocked and pushed the metal gates open wide. She is a 6th-generation Washingtonian and the President of the Woodlawn Cemetery Perpetual Care Association. Her passion for preserving African American burial grounds is active and effective. Her ancestors are buried there and she can tell you about the community and the legacies of the lives they led above ground. The city listens, too.

You may not guess by looking at me, but generations of my ancestors were also buried enslaved or lie in segregated and unmarked graves. African American cemeteries are special to many of us descendants, and their invisibility is by no means random. Their preservation and rehabilitation is an act of love. This work is reclamation of the dignity of lives they often did not enjoy in life. These burial grounds in DC enclose people who built the Capital City and to whom we all owe a great debt of honor.

It was an honor to be among these descendants on one of the five days the gates open to the public. To listen, to witness, and to learn.

It was a pleasure to help a mother and daughter get a picture of themselves in the same spot as a treasured family picture was taken beside their family graves decades ago. It may have seemed to be grasses behind them in the picture frame but I saw generations.

Did you know that the first US Memorial Day parade was organized by recently emancipated enslaved Americans? It was in May of 1865. The commemoration of Memorial Day at Woodlawn is intentional, like all the WCPCA and others are doing to preserve and restore Black cemeteries in the US.

DC’s Mayor Bowser said “DC history is Black history” earlier this year when awarding a grant to “protect and commemorate” Woodlawn and Mt. Zion and Female Union Band Society Cemeteries in Georgetown: the last intact African American cemeteries in the District.

Mark and I climbed to the highest point to take in the vast memorial space in all directions. Foxes and deer scattered to give us space. Woodlawn Cemetery is a beautiful cemetery. It is a place of peaceful remembrance. There are a number of notable people interred there and highlighted on their website. I approached one famous grave, of Blanche Kelso Bruce, born enslaved and who served in the US Senate and as Register of the Treasury. (His signature appeared on US currency.) I sent Kurt a photo of his gravestone.

We chatted with a few visitors as we strolled. There were descendants, volunteers, and one person there for the first time, searching for the grave of an educator of interest. We met members of the Association’s committee. We learned the upcoming dates for volunteering on the grounds. It takes a lot of maintenance and physical work, by the living, to keep burial grounds open and accessible. I plan to return for some upcoming clean-up dates myself. I have done so at Black Georgetown’s cemeteries as well and it is meaningful and connecting: we are needed.

Upcoming clean-ups at Woodlawn Cemetery: June 19, July 25, August 22, September 26.

I cannot find, restore, or mark the graves of my African American ancestors, but I can lend a hand to honor and make visible the ancestors of my DC neighbors.

I should have guessed that my list of cemeteries that have been “moved” would grow faster than the ones visible from the surface. The missing graveyards include more African American burial grounds, and bodies, for obvious reasons. I decided that morning, standing outside the gates of Woodlawn, after Ms White-Richardson pointed out the invisible Payne cemetery across the street, that I will save those visits until I am finished visiting the ones with gates to open and visiting hours. Perhaps because I’m a death doula I feel the difference deserves attention.

The invisible graveyards, whose bodies have been “moved” are moving me more than I anticipated, and I’ll be back.

Mark and I shared that most lovely meatloaf sandwich in the car on our way home.

*paraphrasing her powerful words, as I was spellbound and not taking notes.

Recently, in the last few pages of a manuscript review, I was exhausted. My writer friend, Jennifer, leaned forward and said:

“Put it away. You should take a writing break for two months.” Unthinkable.

I laughed it off. But the next morning I woke up and did not fire up any devices. I just read a book. The break became a week. It is now three weeks, probably. (I am not counting.) I am enjoying reading, right now, more than I have in many years. (I cannot count how many.) Obviously, the dendrites of my brain were waiting for me to feed them. To pause. To ride the thoughts and observations of others. To watch a horizon or two (without counting).

“What are you reading?” Friends inquire. I ask about their reading tables. My texts are now, not uncommonly, pictures of book covers. Not for work, not assigned. Not in stolen moments and fallen asleep on. I am trading books and recommendations. And brain space. With other people. I felt more connected. Reading is anything but solitary.

.

That first week, I finally reorganized my growing deathy library, a project I had been delaying for a year, afraid of the time it would take. It was a pleasant few hours stolen from cemetery stuff. The collection began with a stack of death-related books given to me by the family of a friend who had, rudely, died. It was like visiting with him: Hoff’s handwriting in the margins. I set aside a hillock of books I had acquired in the past few years but not yet opened. Deathy and otherwise. But is anything about life not also about death?

Somewhere in these recent weeks I helped host a book club for the DC Death Collective with my bookish, deathy friend, Catherine the Death Project Manager. She puts on Silent Book Clubs of Death all over and this time we gathered at the estimable MLK Library. It was an intimate group, but the books we each brought were like wrapped gifts we stacked on the table. (If you meet me in person feel free to ask why one in our party exclaimed: “This is the loudest library I have ever seen!” It is a funny story involving witches and venial sins.)

All this is preface to sharing the reading I have been walking through recently when I am not at a cemetery this month. My reading is death-heavy, obviously, but not in a bad way. Stick around for the one I’m reading now, and how you can meet the author.

• Kilo, by Toby Muse

• Will My Cat Eat My Eyeballs, by Caitlin Doughty

• Being Dead Is No Excuse: the official Southern Ladies guide to hosting the perfect funeral, by Gayden Metcalfe and Charlotte Hays

• She may be lying down but she may be very happy, by Jody Gelb

• Marianne, by George Sand

• The Island of Missing Trees, Elif Shafak

• The Dark Interval: Letters on loss, grief, and transformation, by Rainer Maria Rilke

• To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells, by Mia Bay

I am currently reading one particular book, Never Can Say Goodbye, that I want to point to because you may want to meet the author, as I will, on June 1, at Solid State Books. I kept hearing about Darnell Lamont Walker from friends and hearing him interviewed and was intrigued. Many thanks to Jaya Saxena and Leslie Tolf from DCDC for making this happen.

If you are interested in death doulas and other work being done to serve the dying, sign up! If you are a member of The Death Collective there will be a reception before the discussion where you can meet more Collective community members like me!

I realized this morning for the first time that I was mistaken. My recent reading jag has not been a rest so I could write more. Writing again has been nourishing my ability to really read again.

“Tell me what you see” I asked my companions, one a mortician and the other a grave hunter. We were entering a string of adjoining historic cemeteries in Ward 8.

They saw more than dead people.

You can’t do this by Zoom. Or Findagrave. Listen: I enjoy showing up alone, but sharing the experience with friends is invaluable. That day, I had the benefit of three sets of eyes, ears, feet, and extraordinary knowledge and experience.

Besides, these two are kind of a big deal.

Kurt Deion personally visited all existing US Presidents’ grave sites before he graduated high school and since then has catalogued a Who’s Who of the dead and written a book about the topic. His body count, as of today, of famous grave visits: 2952. Some day he’ll get his own orange Find A Grave “famous memorial” star and be the first visitor to log himself a visit. Kurt works at Congressional Cemetery in the Education department.

When Lily Buerkle walks the grounds of a cemetery she understands it from the surface to deep underground in ways few people can. She has been a mortician and funeral director in the DC area long enough to know a small village worth of former residents. She is legend among the living and the dead for her care for families. I knew her as the Director of Funerals at Congressional. Lily will soon open Willow Green, the first funeral home in the area to “specialize in water cremation, human composting and natural burial.”

Lily and Kurt have busy schedules doing important work around death, and I’m still living, so getting a chance to go to a cemetery with both of them at the same time is quite a get. We made it happen this week.

What did the three of us observe as we walked?

Each of the cemeteries we visited were associated with distinct communities but I knew how families across fences and on either side of the sidewalk knew one another. I recognized relatives and interrelated families, communities entwined from Europe to the US over generations, now at rest in Adas Israel , Elesavetgrad, Hebrew Congregational, and the Ohev Shalom Cemeteries. I carried a folder with printouts and maps and coordinates. I was the family genealogist that day, but also a death doula: I was thinking of those who had arrived with a loved one’s remains and left without them. I thought of the countries they had come from, and the addresses all over the city they had lived and worked: all in the past now, but we paid their history honor as we strolled their resting place.

The mortician among us noted the set of the stones, and the symbols above the names. She recognized types and eras of gravestones, and epitaphs. She spoke people’s names aloud, and addressed them warmly.

The author noted the predominant color of the stones, the boundaries of the plots, and knew back stories: he had visited the famous child of one of the couples there. He had pictures. The parents would be so proud.

We met a groundskeeper with a cane on his way to solve a problem who told us vivid stories of the people buried there and the three of us leaned into these stories for the treasures they were. Each from our own perspectives on graveyards. We felt his lifetime of genuine caring for the families in his care. He wished us well on our visit.

These were not sandwich-eating burial grounds. It is hard to know this in advance from photos and descriptions, sandwich eating not being on the usual axis of history and memory and loss of a cemetery, There are rarely written instructions on the relative solemnity and formality of a graveyard. My hypothesis is that sandwich eating on the grounds will correlate with grave goods by the graves. The three of us retreated from the graves to eat our sandwiches away from the burials.

And oh, the sandwiches! Mark sent me with two lovely kinds of sandwiches and packed them in waxed paper in a lunchbox, with drinks and chips and some fruit. His bubbe would be so proud.

There were peanut butter and apple sammies on hearty white bread with a bit of honey and cinnamon. And he described the other ones in a text to Lily later, who asked for the specs but got a particularly Mark sort of poetry: “It was Ciabatta bread from La Brea called “Take and Bake from Safeway. Some no name provolone, applewood Genoa salami (peppered) and the tapenade wasn’t “really” a tapenade. It was Olive Bruschetta from Delallo. Also bought at Safeway. That’s it.”

“It was a great sandwich.” Lily said. It was a great walk.

It is fair to say that I have spent a disproportionate amount of my total cemetery time at Congressional. I will be a permanent resident there for a long time, too. But yes, there are other cemeteries here in DC. Depending on how you count them, I know of 28. Plus the dead cemeteries where the bodies have been moved elsewhere: I know of five of those.

I’m sorry, but “moving the bodies” is a lie. It was the burial, not the tattered scrapings left behind, that make the site a cemetery. The body moves on over months and a few years: we decompose, metabolized by the living organisms of the earth and the leaching of our heavier chemicals into the water table. Yet we cannot be moved. All disinterment does is stop memorializing the person there. We can build a building over the space, but is the grave gone? I grew up fascinated by a reservoir in our community that flooded four small towns to hydrate the people of Boston. 2500 living people were evicted, and 7000 dead. What I remember was we were not allowed to swim there, to keep the water safe from our lively biologies, but the graves stayed at the bottom of the Quabbin reservoir and apparently left the water unharmed.

So, 33 DC cemeteries are my destinations this year, organized in an Excel sheet and marked in a Google map. I had only managed four five when I started this Substack this week, and yesterday I visited my fifth. This is not a coincidence: you are watching now. I feel confident that as I talk about this project I will be gifted with the knowledge of more cemeteries and burial sites, I welcome that knowledge. Thank you to the folks who have already invited me to cemeteries this week. Really: thank you. You get me. You are my kind of weird.

Shall I share my visit today to Mount Olivet Cemetery?

I took the D41 bus. Each line of Metrobus has its own vibe at each time of day. The D41 is a quiet one filled with people but the fare box was out of order in both directions. Someone near the front cheerfully gestured to me to remove my earbuds so they could repeat their request for food money. I had a sandwich in my little backpack but I did not offer it, or any money, and that nagged at me. My fare box was out of order.

It was a pretty day, as you’ll see below. I take terrible photos but cemeteries make great images in any weather. Graves are timeless and patient, and not prissy about rain or gusts: they stay still while we move within them. Mount Olivet has a rolling landscape with neighborhoods and great statuary. You can tell from a distance it is a Catholic burying ground from the ratio of crosses to obelisks. Up close, you notice a ratio of Irish to Italian to Polish surnames. There are so many nuns in neat rows, and more birds posing on grave markers than visitors walking among them.

Mount Olivet received the bodies of Mary Surratt and the first person to jump from the Brooklyn Bridge. I did not look for either grave: I like to simply experience a new cemetery without an agenda. A first look, with the souls of my feet. I’ll be back, my feet say to the former Washingtonians below.

The cemetery was racially desegregated long before other cemeteries in the region. You do not need to be Catholic to be buried there. It is still an active burial ground.

As a living person with a bladder, I am happy to report there is a bathroom in the gatehouse where there are also printed maps of the curving topography. The grounds crew nod and greet you. They have created fascinating native-plant stormwater runoff swales and waterfalls on the grounds. Fascinating to me, at least. One of my favorite grounds staff at Congressional answered the question of “what is the greatest threat to a cemetery?” saying “Water. It’s always water.”

My sandwich of the day was one of my go tos: peanut butter on what we call “busy bread” at our house (Trader Joe’s Super Bread.) I nibbled it just outside the gates, looking in: it is not a cemetery with benches and picnicking.

The same lady requesting food money was on my return bus, meaning my visit to the cemetery spanned exactly one or more loops of the C41 with the same bus and driver: the karma express, clearly. I pulled the stop cord before my destination but the driver did not even pause. I hurried up to the front and asked to be let out but the bus driver said sure, “at the next stop.” My backtrack walk home was not as cheerful, but it felt right.

As usual, when it comes to what my husband calls my “shenanigans,” I need to explain. Apparently, I choose to do unusual things. You’re welcome. Currently, I am visiting all the cemeteries in the District of Columbia. I’m bringing sandwiches. I’m happy to take you along, literally and literarily.

I have enjoyed cemeteries since my introverted father made me think they were a perfectly normal afternoon with the kids. I wrote sad journal entries at Emily Dickinson’s graveyard as a middle schooler. I subscribe to American Cemetery & Cremation Magazine. I visit burial grounds when I travel and drag my friends and family along. I am aware they are humoring me.

I already spend so much of my time at one particular beloved historic cemetery in my adopted city of Washington DC so a more useful challenge might be to visit all the free DC museums, or make a tour of the 229 triangle parks, or maybe try to touch each of the 40 boundary stones that George Washington commissioned to define the city. But no.

Here is my confession: I know so much about Congressional Cemetery but since moving to DC during the pandemic I’ve failed to get to almost any of the other cemeteries here. I am ready to fix that but unable to settle for just visiting more, or doing it when I “have time,” I am making time in my busy life to sit vigil at all of them in 2026, even the dead cemeteries: ones where the bodies have been moved elsewhere (one is a Metro station now).

Death and vigils are my thing. I’m a death doula. I volunteer all over the city to help dying people and educate the living about dying and death. I volunteer as the Death Doula in Residence at Congressional Cemetery where I help host death awareness gatherings. I am co-founder of a new organization of death workers: The DC Death Collective. I know amazing things about dying and death, and funerals and cemeteries, and hospice and death doulas and caregiving and vital statistics and end-of-life planning and grief and fear of death. I do not know very much at all about the cemeteries and burial grounds and graveyards and potter’s fields in our nation’s capital.

For too long, I have been too busy with death to pause in the cemeteries of the city. Let’s see if I can get to all of them in 2026? You can keep me accountable, and I’ll show you a side of the city’s people you may not think about: the part below the ground.

I welcome your company. Do you have a DC Cemetery near you and want company on a stroll? Is there a graveyard you want to go see and I can tag along? I’ll share my sandwich.

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