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:
“I have been searching history to see if really a woman has any precedent to claim the right to have her rights, and I am compelled to say that we men are not so much ahead of women after all, and the only way we have kept our reputation up is by keeping her down—and don’t you forget it!”
—George E. Foster, U.S. women’s magazine contributor. The Woman’s Magazine, pp. 38-41 (October 1886)
“The danger lies in forgetting what we had. The flow between generations becomes a trickle, grandchildren tape-recording grandparents’ memories on special occasions perhaps—no casual storytelling jogged by daily life, there being no shared daily life what with migrations, exiles, diasporas, rendings, the search for work. Or there is a shared daily life riddled with holes of silence.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“O how can it be that the ground itself does not sicken?
How can you be alive you growths of spring?
How can you furnish health you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain?
Are they not continually putting distemper’d corpses within you?
Is not every continent work’d over and over with sour dead?”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)