Illustration by Marley Allen-Ash
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I have long been fascinated with cemeteries. Over the years I have wandered about in rural and urban cemeteries, graveyards, churchyards and burial grounds. In Toronto, St. James Cemetery and Crematorium is a mere 400 metres from my front door. It is a place I visit often.
There is a satisfying ambiguity to St. James that draws me through its Parliament Street gates. It is a place of dignity, sorrow and tranquillity, yet a place of words, architecture and stories all in one beautiful natural park-like setting. Every visit is a discovery of something new about Toronto, its history, about our relationship to death and, ultimately, something about myself.
As strange as it might sound today, cemeteries in the mid-19th century were often a destination for Sunday strolls, child’s play and even picnics. For many city dwellers, a cemetery provided much needed greenery and fresh air that was otherwise lacking.
St. James Cemetery was originally located at the corner of King and Church Streets in the town of York. It was the little churchyard for St. James Cathedral, from 1784 to 1844. As York grew into Toronto, it was replaced with the new St. James Cemetery located on what was (but is no longer) the edge the city in a picturesque setting overlooking the broad valley of the Don River.
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With the advent of urban parks, society started treating cemeteries as sombre sites for burying the dead. Cemetery authorities began introducing professional standards and practices. I came across St. James’s 1906 pamphlet of 36 rules at the library. Rule 31 is my favourite: “Picnic parties, children under 14 unaccompanied by an adult, automobiles, bicycles, tricycles and dogs will not be admitted to the cemetery.”
While I do not picnic at my local cemetery, St. James is one of my favourite parks. Its collection of trees provides cover from the hot summer sun and offers vibrant colours of red, orange and yellow in autumn. But nothing beats the stillness of a January morning walk amongst tombstones of granite and marble, cold looking in a wintry light with the sound of crunching snow under my boots.
Walking through the cemetery is like moving through time. There are literally thousands of stones with stories here. The loneliest sections of the cemetery are its oldest and where I find a collection of gravestones, mausoleums, obelisks and vaults with names of prominent citizens from Toronto’s earliest days.
There are soldiers here, too, like Lieutenant Colonel Coote N Shanly, who after being sent home to recuperate, died in Toronto in 1916 of chronic bronchitis. His is one of the surprisingly many war graves one can visit. One of the more moving memorials I like to visit is that of Jimmie Stewart. His name and circumstance of death are carved into the side of his family’s memorial: “Killed in trolley accident on Scarboro Road July 13, 1895.” These jarring words are now starting to fade and as they do I fear so too will his story.
Some epitaphs are long and detailed while some are short and poignant. The first words I encounter on every walk are poetic and beautiful: Hours fly / flowers die. New days / new ways / Pass by / love stays. They are inscribed on a sundial near the main gate at the entrance to the cemetery.
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I read the epitaphs as the final words communicated by the deceased. What they want to say, thoughts they want to leave us with, and what they want us to know about them. Sometimes epitaphs are not the words of the deceased but of their survivors. I ask myself if I would leave my final words to someone else.
I wonder a little about my interest in visiting the graves of people I have no connection to and reading their stories. So I reach out to a life and legacy coach I knew from when I lived in Saskatoon. I am hoping she can help put my interest into focus.
“There are a number of ways to think of cemeteries” Karla Combres tells me. “They are about living and they are for the living. Those mausoleums, tombstones and monuments you saw are a last-ditch effort at immortality; to not be forgotten. We inherently want to be remembered, we desire immortality. For those of us left behind, for the living, they are an important reminder that we are mortal. That our time will come to an end.”
I am left wondering how I want to be remembered.
Kevin Kitchen lives in Toronto.