`Wearied of This Mortal Life, I Rest'

I worked for two newspapers in upstate New York and for both of them I wrote a regular feature called “Crossroads,” devoted to rural non-places scattered over that part of the country. New York doesn’t recognize the existence of hamlets, though I documented more than 200 of them. I would show up unannounced and tramp about all day, talking to locals who related to me the rumors and folklore that passed for history. Most of these forgotten places were not marked with signs and had no post office but bore the name of a once-prominent, now extinct family – Drummonds Corners, Porters Corners and Coons Corners, for instance, in Saratoga County. I might find a church, tavern or feed and grain store. In Eagle Bridge, in Rensselaer County, I explored the remains of an abandoned bookstore in the skeleton of a saloon. Books were shelved on and under the bar, in sinks and coolers, and all were dusted with snow that blew through the doors and broken windows.

Almost every hamlet had a small cemetery, most surrounded by stone walls, and that’s where I would sit to eat my lunch. Some were well-tended, some overgrown. The most beautiful, especially in May and June, were dense with phlox, violets and other wildflowers that grew in a dense carpet over the graves. I was always reminded of “Mr. Hunter’s Grave,” one of the essays in Joseph Mitchell’s The Bottom of the Harbor, devoted to an old black community on the south shore of Staten Island. Mitchell said he would go there, Ishmael fashion, “when things get too much for me,” to wander and look for wildflowers in the old graveyard. There’s a lovely moment when he identifies peppergrass on the grave of Rachel Dissoway, who died April 7, 1802, at the age of 27. In such places, thoughts of mortality and mutability mingle easily with flowers, birds and sunshine. Thanks to time and acid rain, inscriptions on many grave stones, some dating from the19th and even the late 18th century, were illegible. More than 250 years ago, Thomas Gray, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” noted the pathos of graveyard vanity:

“Yet e’en these bones from insult to protect
Some frail memorial still erected nigh,
With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture deck'd,
Implores the passing tribute of a sigh.

“Their name, their years, spelt by th' unletter'd Muse,
The place of fame and elegy supply…”

All of this came to mind as I was reading Over Their Dead Bodies: Yankee Epitaphs & History, collected by Thomas C. Mann and Janet Greene, and published in 1962 by the Stephen Greene Press in one of my favorite small cities, Brattleboro, Vt. (former home of Rudyard Kipling, burial site of Saul Bellow). I’ve read similar collections, some too scholarly, some too folksy, but this is an elegant piece of book design, written with a fine balance of humor and thoughtfulness, rather like the epitaphs themselves. Here’s one for the wonderfully named Lorenzo Sabine, who died in 1877, age 74, in Eastport, Maine:

“Transplanted.”

How’s that for Yankee laconicism? And here’s vanity masking as anti-vanity, from a grave dated 1882 in Hartford, Conn.:

“Those who cared for him while living
Will know whose body is buried here.
To others it does not matter.”


The intent of this epitaph, for Mrs. Eunice Page, who died in 1888, age 73, in Plainfield, Vt., is uncertain:

“Five time five years I lived a virgin’s life
Nine times five years I lived a virtuous wife;
Wearied of this mortal life, I rest.”

Such inscriptions have something in common with the fiction of Henry James. We wish to ask: Who wrote this, and what did he or she mean? What was their intent? Where does the irony start and stop? What constitutes an unreliable narrator? Take this message left by Capt. Augustus N. Littlefield, who died in 1878 at age 75 in Newport, R.I.:

“An experienced and careful master
mariner who never made a call upon
underwriters for any loss.”

Is that how Capt. Littlefield wished to be remembered, or did friends and relatives have a say in the matter? We’ll never know. And let me note another mortal resonance. The copy of Over Their Dead Bodies I’m reading is from the Fondren Library at Rice University. It was given to the Fondren as part of the personal library of the late literary critic and scholar Frederick J. Hoffman. Every week I come across one or two of his books, all neatly inscribed inside the cover with his signature, place of residence (“Madison, Wisconsin,” in this case) and date. In this volume it’s “May 6, 1967.” Hoffman died that year.