A good tonic for the weekend: Have Friday lunch with two or three friends who enjoy laughing with each other. Sounds easy enough. The morning of, a friend sends an email: “So and so and I are going to be at such and such restaurant at 11:45. Be there.”
I was a little late for the gathering having gone to hear Kate Sweeney at the Rosenzweig talk about a favorite subject, cemeteries. Sweeney, an Atlanta writer who fittingly met her husband in that town’s Oakland Cemetery, read from her book “American Afterlife.” Sweeney was one of the all-star cast of presenters at this year’s Decorative Arts & Preservation Forum.
This year’s topic was “Coming for to Carry Me Home — Mourning customs of the 19th Century.”
Sweeney waxed eloquent about the old cemeteries like Oakland (and our own Friendship) and their “extravagant decay.” She says they have the feel of the “ancient and noble,” as they surely do. Like Friendship, which began about the same time, Oakland has grown topsy-turvy and that is its charm, the eclectic assortment of monuments — ranging from modest to ostentatious — and the sentiments — sugary sentimental to matter-of-fact — expressed on them. The concluding slide in Sweeney’s presentation, that of a stone on which simply said, “This Man Lived.”
And then there was the plaque next to the grave of the first inhabitant of Oakland, a Dr. James Nissen, who died Sept. 22, 1850. Evidently the good doctor had a fear of being buried alive so he requested that after his death a doctor cut his jugular just to make sure he was dead and stayed that way. Friendship’s first internment came a year earlier with the burial of Mary Elizabeth Bell Sinclair, who died in childbirth.
This is not the first time I have in this space extolled the charms of Friendship Cemetery where one (if he’s lived here for any time) can contemplate his mortality in the quiet company of old friends, loved ones and curious unknown characters from an earlier time about whom one can wonder and even invent stories.
Says Ms. Sweeney, no one is building new cemeteries — not like these, anyway. She calls them an “endangered piece of the past.” Complementing a rich assortment of tombstones are Friendship’s ancient and magnificent magnolias and boxwoods, which long predate anyone reading this, and baring ill-advised stewardship will endure long after we are all gone.
On the subject of natural beauty, I encourage you to take a drive out Officer’s Lake Road late one afternoon this week, preferably a sunny one. Go past Proffitt’s Porch toward Highway 50. A mile or so on the left, you’ll come to a cypress swamp with trees in all shades of fall, garnished by a riot of yellow flowers — I think they are swamp sunflowers. It’ll make you glad to be alive.
Birney Imes III is the immediate past publisher of The Dispatch.
You can help your community
Quality, in-depth journalism is essential to a healthy community. The Dispatch brings you the most complete reporting and insightful commentary in the Golden Triangle, but we need your help to continue our efforts. In the past week, our reporters have posted 32 articles to cdispatch.com. Please consider subscribing to our website for only $2.30 per week to help support local journalism and our community.