Making Your Mark

In the middle of January, on an odd warm day, the sunshine called us and took us to dark places. Hannah and I are photography friends and love to spend free days exploring and shooting pictures.  And so we were off. On Hannah’s suggestion we traveled north of the city to visit the oldest “park” cemetery in St. Louis—Bellefontaine Cemetery.

Bellefontaine is noted for its age and beautiful statuary, and the people interred there, of course, are some of the more notable names in St. Louis history. The history, the people of varied stature and the stories that make up the drama of their lives all hold a fascination for me. Then too, there is that inevitable and eternal question that has to be navigated whenever you enter a cemetery. Ideas and bones are stored in a burial ground.

And so, with the enthusiasm of Discovery and in the resting place of William Clark himself we began our expedition. The first few steps into the graveyard, however, brought me face to face not with a civic leader or famous beer baron, but Everyman, a memorial in honor of a family by the name of Fears. And doesn’t it all start there? Even if we come to some spiritual peace with death, there is always some fear, a little uneasiness, a tightening of the throat that accompanies it.

I guess at its basic level the reason for the fear is the uncertainty of what comes after, the looming unknown. Then there are always all the things associated with death, like illness, pain and suffering and the knowledge that death is something that happens when we get worse… But if there is any peace in a common end, you’d think you could find it at Bellefontaine, a 314 acre swath of earth with  87,000 people who have gone before you.

And when they go, they do it in a celebrated fashion. Evidenced on the grounds is an equally universal urge, the need to commemorate the life lived. The monuments at Bellefontaine are extraordinary.

Among the more common markers are stones the size of automobiles, statuary 10, 20, 30 feet high and obelisks that stand as tall as trees reaching upwards with the branches back to the sun--each shrine dedicated to the memory of a life. Then among the monuments, I happened to see someone’s initials carved in a tree. And I thought how the great and the small, in death and in life each wants to make a mark, a trace of our existence. We are; we were here, and somehow that matters.


Initials and dates on a tree

 Some people, of course, have some pretty straight forward affirmation in their lives. Among the dead at Bellefontaine are government leaders, business moguls and founders of educational institutions. Some of those notable people are Robert Barnes, founder of Barnes Hospital, David Ranken Jr. founder of Ranken Technical College, Susan Blow, the creator of kindergarten, Missouri Governor David Francis, Anton Griesedieck, founder of Griesedieck Brothers Brewery, as well as the Lemp family the original brewers of Falstaff, when it was and they were. 

They have monuments of achievement, and very often those achievements are engraved in the stones.

This is the monument on Robert Barnes' grave. He was a grocer originally from Washington D.C. who bequeathed one million dollars to establish a hospital for the poor in 1892. Today, Barnes Jewish Hospital is one of the top ranked hospitals in America according to U.S. News and World Report.

The Lemp family mausoleum

This is the monument for Anton Griesedieck, a German immigrant and founder of the Griesedieck Brothers Brewing Company which made Stag and Falstaff beers. 

Detail Griesedieck tomb.

Then there are the more personal tributes, left by the living for those they loved. 

Below this life sized sculpture are the words “Here rests in sweet repose—until day breaks, beloved by everyone that knew her, the noblest of them all Katie Lumelius 1852-1913.  For 38 years the loyal wife, the inspiration and the guardian angel of Henry Studniczka.

Others leave an epitaph, words of wisdom, perhaps a creed, a realization, a life song, a word to those who pass. And if their lives are not recorded in the history books, those words may be the only thing we know of them, once those that know them have made their own departure.

And the tombs, the mausoleums stand so elegantly on the grounds, built with marble and stone with names carved above the green copper doors and the deep rich color of stained glassed, lilies illumined with sunlight which shine only in the dark recesses of the sepulcher where the bones lie.

Detail of the window in the Lemp mausoleum

Each of the stained glass windows above are windows in mausoleums on the grounds. The photos were taken through the glass on doors looking into the tombs.

The opulence of the edifices, the wealth that makes them possible is evident, but so is the love and the honor bestowed on family. And when you consider the most famous tombs like the Pantheum in Rome, the Taj Mahal in India and the Great Pyramid of Gaza you know that we are as a species compelled in some way to complete this task.  A small castle to hold the dust seems elaborate, but it is a monument to life, to heritage, and yes, continuity, a pebble cast into the river of eternity, a hope that life is not without purpose and a desire for some kind of permanence.

I am reminded of a verse from scripture.

“He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot understand what God has done from beginning to end,”  Ecclesiastes 3:11.

There is hope there, and those of Christian hope often mark it upon their stones in scripture or verse . One stone in particular caught my attention.  On it was the following:

“Safe, safe at last, from storm, from strife, moored in the depths of Christ’s unfathomed grave with spirits just, with dear ones lost and found again, this strange ineffable life is life eternal. Death here has no place, and they are welcomed best who suffered most.”

And saints and angels wait-- touching the tombs, clutching the horns that will blow, holding the scroll which calls the righteous to gather with the wind. 

They are lovely—copper and stone, cast in hope of the future.

But living still are the shrubbery, the holly, the evergreens planted to shade the graves and the leaves that rustled verdant even in the dead of  January, a living memorial and a reminder that life goes on.

For most of us though, there will be a stone, a name and dates, a beginning and an end. And one day when some fool with a camera treads across the grave, they probably won’t even stop to notice. 

I don’t think that means that our lives went unnoticed however, even if we didn’t make the history books, even if our list of achievements is kind of short, and our list of shortcomings is kind of long. Each person has some kind of impact in the great chain of being. The people we touch, touch others, the values we embrace influence our community, the compassion we show makes life, being, a little bit better. Being and time is really all that we have to offer, all that remains and all that really matters. And I think of the remains of those who in battle have lost even their identity whose graves are marked with humble stones that say “Known only to God.”  And I know in reality that is for all of us our only true and eternal memorial.  

When all was said and done then, and our cameras were packed up and we were on the highway once again, we asked ourselves as I pose to you-- How will you leave your mark?