Andy Young: The graveyard shift

By Andy Young

One afternoon long ago my brother, several of my cousins and I were stuffed into a Ford Falcon station wagon. My uncle was at the wheel. None of us were wearing seatbelts, which was understandable, since at the time such items didn’t exist, or if they did, they weren’t standard equipment on Ford Falcon station wagons.

Part of the beauty of being a child passenger inside an automobile during the pre-seatbelt era was having the freedom of motion necessary to covertly poke, pinch, punch, and/or kick whichever sibling(s) and/or cousin(s) they felt like pestering at the time. Similarly, the target(s) of such provocations, who were also unrestrained physically, were free to maneuver themselves around the inside of the car in order to evade the bullying of older, more aggressive passengers or, if the opportunity presented itself, to launch a counterattack.

If you’re worried this childhood recollection is going to end in some sort of horrific tragedy that could have been avoided had we only been wearing seatbelts, well, don’t be. My uncle lived to a ripe old age, and most of the youthful passengers who were in the car that day are still alive, hoping to do likewise. But my most vivid recollection regarding that particular outing was my uncle, who was desperately attempting to calm his rambunctious passengers, asking (or probably shouting, just so he could be heard) as we passed a graveyard, “How many people are dead in that cemetery?”

There was a pause. Then someone hesitantly chirped, “a hundred?” An older, slightly deeper voice scornfully retorted, “There must be at least a thousand in there.” The rest of us began chiming in with various estimates, but my uncle, having successfully gotten our minds on something other than torturing one another, urged us to keep trying. We spent the rest of the ride venturing further guesses about exactly how many deceased individuals there actually were in that graveyard. When we arrived at our destination my uncle finally revealed the precise number of people who were dead in that cemetery. The answer, of course, was “all of them.”

I’ve been thinking more about cemeteries recently, since there are several of them along the route I’ve been taking to work lately. South Portland is home to at least five graveyards, which seems like an awful lot for a place the size of Maine’s fourth-largest city. But the truth is there are more people buried in just one of South Portland’s boneyards, the 97-acre Forest City Cemetery (over 30,000, according to Portland’s Department of Parks, Recreation, and Facilities, which oversees the place), than there are living, breathing citizens in the entire city (26,498, according to the 2020 census).

However, South Portland is hardly the only place in America with more dead residents than live ones. Take, for example, Colma, California, which lies on the San Francisco Peninsula. Founded as a necropolis (burial ground) in 1924, the 1.89 square mile unincorporated town is currently home to, per the 2020 census, just 1,507 extant human beings. However, it also houses more than 1.5 million dead folks, meaning that Colma’s ratio of deceased inhabitants to living ones is somewhere around a thousand to one.

By utter coincidence, my current abode is located a mere mile from a burial ground that’s been there, if one believes what’s been etched into some of the older stones, for more than two centuries. Despite its age, though, I know for a fact the cemetery in my town is a truly high-quality one because, as my uncle would no doubt have gleefully pointed out, people are still dying to get into it. <