Where Eternity Seems Less Than Restful

In a tucked-away area at the rear of Hollywood Memorial Park, just off a cul-de-sac, rows of graves marked with the Star of David create a sad, weather-worn entrance to the older part of the cemetery’s Jewish section.

Unlike the graveyard’s entryway, with its enormous obelisks, mausoleums, urns and statues, some of the back section’s headstones have slipped off their foundations and sit in front of their cracked stone stumps. Other tablets have toppled over.

Eternal life at Hollywood Memorial is better than at some notorious Southern California cemeteries, where state investigators last year discovered a series of misdeeds from improper burial to mismanagement of funds.

Yet walking by these grave markers is unsettling. After all, we picture ourselves and our families spending eternity in a place that reflects the tranquillity we hope death will bring, a place with singing birds and manicured flowers and trees.

When grave sites devolve into something that seems to defy a quiet rest, it upsets more than our notions about propriety and respect. It shakes our ability to deal with death.

*

Just in from the southwestern corner of Hollywood Memorial, a few rows of graves are well maintained. Some headstones are tall rectangles, covered in dried flowers, with the actual burial site marked by bricks.

Behind the plots with larger markers are the rows of the long-dead.

The grass back there is more brown, dry and haggard than elsewhere in the park. The ground is cracked and rippled, causing some of the tablets to lean precariously toward their neighbors’ headstones.

A car horn that routinely toots the first few notes of “La Cucaracha” serves as a reminder that the static-like noise in the background is actually the rush of traffic just beyond the high cemetery walls.

Hollywood Memorial employees said they are constrained by the fact that they are under the control of a court-appointed trustee, stemming from questions about park finances. A front office worker at the cemetery, who asked not to be identified, said the overseer ordered it to stop selling new plots.

Repairs have always been the responsibility of the family of the deceased, he said, and the park is not in a position to do very much.

“We’re in a pretty tight situation and we try to do the best we can,” he said. “We’d have this place looking like the Taj Mahal if we had the money and the manpower, but we don’t.”

The families of the people who lie here undoubtedly believed they were interring their relatives in a nice place, marking the plots with what once must have been beautiful gravestones. But decades after a burial, when those who cared about the deceased are also gone, even expensive graves can come to look less than loved.

There are no walkways around the tightly squeezed-in plots in this section of Hollywood Memorial. Looky-loos and the bereaved alike invariably--probably unwittingly--tread atop the actual graves, startled by the soft ground.

*

What would these now-too-close neighbors have thought about their final situation?

The headstone for the Leffs tilts achingly to the left on rippled, cracking ground, looking as if a strong wind could send their marker smashing into the next stone.

When beloved husband and father Julious and beloved wife and mother Esther Leff lived and died is a mystery. The dates are obscured by the leaning stone’s foundation.

Isaac Boasberg, inscribed forever as “Husband,” lived from 1857 to 1940. A blank plaque to the right of Issac’s name was never filled in, making Isaac look eternally lonely.

John Slobodien’s gravestone foundation came so far up that the small headstone cracked off. The tablet indicating his dates, 1868 to 1943, now rests on the grave, leaning against the block that used to support it.

The tablet for “Beloved Mother” Claartje (Kate) Alexander, 1858 to 1943, also slipped off its foundation. It now sits at a perilously forward angle in a crevice, perhaps held up by the long crab grass that grows between the headstone and its perch.

The sunken ground in front of another marker is outlined with a rectangular crack, hinting at what lies below.

Those who buried these people might also have passed on, or have simply stopped coming. Or maybe these graves do have visitors, but ones who cannot do much for their loved ones’ unfortunate state.

In any event, these forlorn markers are now ones that people walk by, mostly oblivious, on their way to find somebody else.