All Saints Day

I did my duty on November 1st. With flowers in hand I headed to see the four tombs at Hope Mausoleum housing my parents and brother, my maternal grandparents and my maternal grandparents and my mom's sister and husband. I placed the requisite flowers, meditated about those long gone loved ones, and browsed to see the condition of the mausoleum, and I observed both the other still alive occupants of the mausoleum and the engravings on some of the dead ones that tell stories ordinary and fascinating. In largely Catholic New Orleans, All Saints Day on November 1st and All Souls' Day on November 2nd have been observed for centuries through rituals celebrating life over death. You are expected to "visits the graves' of departed ones.

New Orleanians pay special attention to their graveyards. Friends and relatives of the deceased show up on those days, cleaning and painting tombs, and decorating them with fall flowers and leaving mementos on the tomb. Sometimes religious services are even held in the cemeteries. In early days, All Saints Day was quite a family event, when everyone socialized, bringing refreshments and leaving keepsakes such as "immortelles”. While this may seem bizarre, it is no more strange than the habits of citizens practiced in late 19th century American west's in which huge cheering s crowds would turn out to watch, eat and party at a town's public hanging of criminals convicted of various deeds. One honors loved dead ones, the other cheers the death of strangers.

Hope Mausoleum is a sedate burial site, a huge marbled palace encased in granite that was constructed because some underground burials were producing too many floating bodies as rains popped up the caskets and deposited the remains above. But we have some weird cemetery rituals that are still on-going at some of the others here.

One example is St. Roch Cemetery. Its chapel is most notable for the "relic room", where plaster casts of body parts, braces, crutches, and the like, are placed in recognition of cures affected through the intercession of St. Roch. Yep! People still go to a cemetery to pray for cures. But wait! Women also still pray there for St. Roch to find a husband for them.

On my visit to Hope I saw mostly old people who were probably there for recently deceased spouses or siblings. The only young people I noticed, and it was crowded, were small children who were no doubt being initiated in the practice of "cemetery visiting". I doubt those kids will retain and interest in such a thing when older. This generation of immediate gratification and electronic stimulation has little room for cemetery visiting. Just as funerals are becoming less frequent and burials in cemeteries being replaced by cremation, the New Orleans habit of remembering loved ones at cemeteries will, no doubt, "die" a slow but steady death.

It's too bad, because cemeteries are really more for the living than for the dead.