Keeping Memories Alive
Many of the niches in the Columbarium contain pictures and personal memorabilia that provide uncanny insight into the lives of the those interred. Even the urns themselves often reflect the individual's personality. People have used cookie jars, teapots, brandy decanters and piggy banks to celebrate the memory of loved ones.
On the Columbarium tour, caretaker Emmitt Watson provides an oral history of the lives represented in the niches. Employed at the Columbarium since the Neptune Society acquisition, Watson has spent years becoming familiar with the niches and listening to visiting families' stories as he worked on the building's restoration. The personal anecdotes and intimate details Watson reveals about the "apartments" on his tour transforms the morbidity one might expect from a walk through a cemetery into a funny and often touching trip down memory lane.
Read more about this topic: Neptune Society Columbarium
Famous quotes containing the words keeping, memories and/or alive:
“It is rare indeed that people give. Most people guard and keep; they suppose that it is they themselves and what they identify with themselves that they are guarding and keeping, whereas what they are actually guarding and keeping is their system of reality and what they assume themselves to be.”
—James Baldwin (1924–1987)
“It seems to me that I have always existed and that I possess memories that date back to the Pharaohs.”
—Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880)
“In another’s sentences the thought, though it may be immortal, is as it were embalmed, and does not strike you, but here it is so freshly living, even the body of it not having passed through the ordeal of death, that it stirs in the very extremities, and the smallest particles and pronouns are all alive with it. It is not simply dictionary it, yours or mine, but IT.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)