Living among Headstones (review)

I, like many other fortunate readers, first encountered Shannon Applegate's remarkable storytelling powers in Skookum (1988), a historical chronicle of her Oregon pioneer family. Her most recent book, Living among Headstones, offers additional family portraits: most memorably, her embattled, loving account of her military father, Rex Applegate, nicknamed "Colonel Superhawk" and once described as "Sort of a Thinking Man's Rambo" (134–35). Living among Headstones describes Applegate's experiences as the sexton of a small, red-dirt pioneer cemetery on a ridge overlooking Yoncalla, Oregon, where she has deep, abiding family ties. Using a series of loosely linked essay-chapters, she creates a narrative skein of memoir, history, and eschatology artfully threaded through the eye of this local graveyard.

Applegate's job overseeing vestiges of the past offers an illuminating vantage on the present. Yoncalla is an economically stressed "timber dependent" community. Like small rural towns throughout the United States, it attracts families in "a perpetual state of transition and crisis. The abusive, the addicted, and the spiritually and morally rootless need a place to hide—for a while, anyway" (213). For downcast younger members of the community, methamphetamines and suicide often lead to an early death. Funerals remain important community events for many of Yoncalla's older residents, who still "carry caskets, deliver eulogies, prepare floral arrangements … and bake for the 'bereaved'" (280). Increasingly, however, dispersed and disbanded families turn the memorialization and care of their dead over to "professionals" with package deals on plots, vaults, and graveside amenities. Applegate wonders at one point whether her generation's fondness for cremation and the scattering of ashes "is a sign of how things have come apart; of how little rootedness remains for many of us. … [B]eing scattered everywhere is like being nowhere. The phrase 'nowhere to be seen' comes to mind" (204–5).

Alternately impish and meditative, Applegate includes many details about mortuary practices, past and present. She discusses the fear of graveyard "miasmas," the nineteenth-century Rural Cemetery Movement, Native burial practices of local Oregon tribes, and headstone iconography. In the cemetery itself, she finds a story under every headstone: about a beloved local woman doctor or pioneer couples with the wife buried on the left, or the "heart side," of the husband. The specter of children's burial sites evokes a special poignancy. There are fifty-nine graves of children who died before reaching age twelve; one headstone features replicas of a baby's tiny ink footprints taken from a yellowed hospital certificate. Applegate's eye for detail is acute, her sense of paradox insightful. To adapt her own comment about Leonardo da Vinci, she observes with a compassion that lives beside her curiosity.

Steeped in history and full of vivid contemporary anecdotes, Living among Headstones demonstrates that the best western writing about "place" remains stubbornly, unapologetically local while simultaneously reaching out to broader realms of history and cultural expression, whether in contemporary Bosnia and Mexico City or ancient Egypt. Shannon Applegate has written another wonderfully unclassifiable book.