PRIVATE LIVES, PUBLIC PLACES / LINDA BLANDFORD : Here, Even Death Is a Job for a Sunny Day
There was a time when a man knew where he would be laid to rest. Aunt Nellie on one side, Grandfather Jim on the other, wife below him and children under a nearby tree. What we have now is the no-death package: the memorial service as reminder of life, not the passing from it, the body-less funeral in which there is no dead and thus none laid to rest.
So where do we go in search of the village graveyard of our tradition? Who will stand by the headstone in place of the ruddy-cheeked minister with yesterday’s soup stains on his sleeve? Who follows the coffin, if not the gaunt hollow-eyed Dickensian figure in black? The images of death--whether of keening women throwing themselves on coffins or of Waugh’s sly “Loved One”--they are all ways of keeping death from us. How many of us laugh at billboards offering Pre-Need Counseling, only to leave our wills unwritten?
There are no coffins these days, only caskets. There are no dead, only the deceased. And for 100,000 of them, Valhalla awaits in sun-dappled lawns beside the runway of Burbank Airport.
It is a curious thought for a city built on mobility to imagine so many lying still; curiously old-fashioned: Will the day come when there will be no burials, no space allowed or available?
Valhalla, let it be remembered, was the burial place of Norse heroes slain in battle--those who stood in death beside the gods. It is a poetic name for a cemetery opened in 1924 amid 80 acres of San Fernando Valley grazing land on Victory Boulevard, and known now as Valhalla-Pierce Brothers. Someone still believes there is room for mighty heroes in this small and anonymous age.
It is fitting that Richard Steinmetz should work here: In this city of orphans, of the uprooted, it is comforting to find a man who still lives where he was born and grew up. Half a century passed in Van Nuys, man and boy. He is round, plump, smooth, blue-eyed and jovial. “I am a person,” he says “of good nature.” A man who has learned not to grate, to have no jagged edges in a place where we have taken the claws from death lest it scratch and tear at us.
Steinmetz has buried men his age, and younger. He has embalmed the early heart attacks, dressed those withered by cancer. It has left him with an unexpected disregard for his own body. In his lifetime, he has lost 500 or 600 pounds; it worries him not. “I believe that God is going to take me when he wants to. I don’t do ‘thank God that wasn’t me.’ I do do a lot of ‘thank God that wasn’t my family.’ ”
His father was an aircraft engineer, later in the notions business. His mother was a mortician’s secretary. When her boss offered him a bachelor apartment over the mortuary in return for cleaning up at night and answering the phone on weekends, he accepted happily. He was in his teens and immortal. “Besides, I knew the deceased wouldn’t hurt me.”
He has made of himself a rational man. “I don’t feel the presence of God here; I’m not that kind of person. What is here is not the person or the person’s life, it is the shell of the person.” Driving through the velvet-green cemetery, he notices, though, the graves that have flowers on them. In the distance, a gray-haired woman is kneeling by a grave marker, fussing with a trowel over the grass around it. The sprinklers reach her and she gets up crossly as if interrupted in a conversation, which she probably was. Some women come every day to visit their husbands. Who does not take comfort where it is to be found?
Every now and again, the other Richard Steinmetz breaks through. The man who tries so hard to please and makes no judgments steps aside and he shows his outrage that people are buried with no markers, that families deliver bodies and drive off never to return, that men go alone to the grave. He knows what has been lost in the modern cemetery: that no vertical gravestones are permitted, only those standard-sized identical flat markers--so untidy otherwise, so inconvenient for the motor mowers. As if man’s life is rolled flat by the process, as if even in death there is no reaching toward heaven, no symbolic rituals that endure. Long ago, milleniums away, man buried his dead with meaning: the mystery was observed. “Death is no mystery,” says Steinmetz. “I know what death is. Life is the mystery.”
Steinmetz has no plot. “I haven’t bought my grave, because when I die my company’s going to take care of me.” No embalming, no fancy stuff, no holding on for him. Others prefer to know where they will spend Eternity. Plots by the airport, $400 these days; out front, $1,400. Out front, where lie Gen. Abdul Rahman 1910-1989, and Afagh Ejebal “beloved mother and grandmother” 1912-1988, and Namatullah Asghari 1-1-56 Afghanistan 10-21-88. The mystery of life, indeed, wondering who would cross oceans to end thus in a tiny patch of Burbank.
Who would not rather be buried out by the runway with great jets lifting like Elijah’s Chariot toward the very heavens? All those, presumably, who believe that afterlife means after 40.