Jonesville Cemetery (Photography by Dunerat)

Reposted from One Day at a Time.

This is the blog post I've been looking forward to writing all week!

Since we were on vacation in the Atlanta area last week, I couldn't resist the lure of some of the area's great historical cemeteries. We had a ton of sightseeing planned already, and the primary focus of the trip was visiting family, so I knew I couldn't actually spend the entire week dragging my poor husband around a bunch of cemeteries, no matter how excited I was about them, which meant I needed to pick one I that was really excited about.

Unfortunately for Greg, he can't resist my jumping-up-and-down excitement any more than I can resist his, which is not at all.

I borrowed my father-in-law's computer to hop on Find-A-Grave (which launched some interesting conversations because he is a genealogy enthusiast himself) and searched for photo requests in the area. There were several open, and I picked out a few likely prospects from among the cemeteries listed; my particular interest is older graves. The iconography fascinates me, as it has since I first read about it as an example for applying a battleship curve to typological seriation back in my undergraduate archaeology classes (. I'm perfectly happy to fulfill photo requests for more recent interments, of course, but I get especially excited about historical ones.

The notes on the Find-A-Grave page for Jonesville Cemetery grabbed my attention. "This cemetery was recently uncovered. It contains the graves of freed slaves. The Mt Sinai Baptist Church is clearing the land for the cemetery." The page listed only four interments in the cemetery, none of which had photos. I was instantly thrilled by the prospect of tackling this project- a very historically interesting, mostly undocumented cemetery belonging to an often-overlooked segment of the population. As an added bonus, it sounded small enough to make a manageable morning outing, which was a selling point in presenting the idea to my husband.

A quick Google search turned up a couple of local news articles which provided some further information and heightened my interest. The cemetery is located on Dobbins Air Reserve Base, not far inside the gate.

The helpful duty staffer at Dobbins gave us good, clear directions, and despite his insistence that the cemetery was "pretty hard to find," we walked right to it and wondered what on earth he was talking about when he said that. It was a bit secluded, but the fenceline was readily visible from the path we had been directed to, and the gate was standing open when we arrived, giving us our first glimpse of a sparse handful of gravestones half-hidden among brush and overgrowth.


We were both surprised at the sheer amount of overgrowth in the cemetery, given the enthusiastic news articles about clearing, cleanup, and more planned work days. Only the northern portion of the cemetery was clear enough to walk through. The southern end of the fenced property was still too densely overgrown to penetrate at all, or to glimpse any gravestones in, if any were there. I haven't yet spoken to anyone at Mt. Sinai Baptist Church to find out what stage their cleanup effort is in and what activity has taken place since the first round of news articles in early 2011, but my best guess is that their efforts this past winter focused on the northern end of the cemetery for one reason or another, and that those efforts could not prevent spring and summer's growth of dense foliage.

The cemetery was alive with swarms of mosquitoes and yellowjackets, and within minutes I was regretting having packed only my favorite pair fo flip-flops for our entire trip; I had itchy feet the whole way home. Even my usually bug-immune husband was swatting at mosquitoes and went home with a few itchy bites, though thankfully we avoided any repeats of the yellowjacket incident at our wedding- not for lack of recklessly stomping where I pleased without regard to where the silly things were buzzing around. The whole experience definitely felt more like a crazy wilderness adventure than the sedate stroll through a historical cemetery that I had been expecting earlier in the week. Fortunately, I like that kind of thing.

In the accessible northern section of the cemetery, the plant growth was still daunting, and we found ourselves wading through tall weeds and occasional thorns and burrs to make our way from grave to grave, and getting a photograph of most of the markers meant clearing away varying amounts of foliage first; we made sure to get before- and after-clearing images, partially because, thanks to having been an archaeology student in a former life, I believe in documenting any changes made to the site, and partially just to illustrate the overgrown state of the cemetery.

The photo request that drew us to Jonesville Cemetery in the first place was for Rebecca Bedford (1865-1908) whose children touchingly memorialized her as simply "OUR MOTHER." Sadly, we found her marker lying under a tree, broken and lying on its own base.


Mrs. Bedford's marker was in otherwise in good condition, only slightly weatherworn; the clasped-hands engraving was still clearly visible, and the epitaph was legible (except for the last line being partially obscured by the stone's breakage).


Mrs. Bedford's gravestone was one of the last we found, though; we found ten interments during our morning's exploration, including the double-interment of L.B. and Rosa Moore. Their double headstone was lying flat on the ground, though it did not appear damaged; it was almost totally obscured by weeds and underbush when we noticed it after the pair of footstones bearing the initials L.B.M. and R.M. caught our attention.


Upon clearing, only the surname "MOORE" was visible in capital letters. Lifting the marker to see if anything was engraved on the other side wasn't really an option with just the two of us there, so we were left with only a pair of initials and no birthdates, deathdates, epitaphs, or other information about the couple interred there.


Only later, when we found a small gravestone mostly hidden by a bush, did we have any clue to the Moores' identity. Hidden among the leaves of the bush growing wild next to the mostly cleared grave of Annie Roberson (1823-1892), Greg spotted a tiny bright glimpse of stone.


With the foliage carefully cleared away, we discovered a small gravestone with a lamb engraved above the epitaph- traditionally, but not always (as I learned at McBryde Cemetery earlier this week) an indicator of a child's grave. We had found the grave of little Janie Moore (1891-1893), whose epitaph identifies her as the "DAU. OF L.B. AND ROSA MOORE." We suddenly had names and a family connection for the Moores.


The verse reads:

"Asleep in Jesus
Oh, how sweet.
To be with such a
blessing meet."

This seems to be a modified version of an excerpt from the hymn "Asleep in Jesus":

"Asleep in Jesus!
O how sweet
To be with such a slumber meet."

Some interesting background and theological commentary on this hymn can be found here.

It is unclear why Janie Moore was buried separately from her parents, alongside Annie Roberson. Perhaps she was some relation.

In trying to find further information on the burials at Jonesville, the best source my internet research turned up was a publication by the Cobb County Genealogical Society which purported to include a listing of burials in several cemeteries including Jonesville. According to the Cobb County Library, which is very kindly sending me scans of the relevant pages, the list contains 27 marked burials.

According to an official of the Cobb Cemetery Commission, cited in this article in the Marietta Daily Journal, "at least 36 graves" were located during cleanup efforts in February 2011; the article notes that "Most are unmarked, but a few have headstones or fieldstones [...]." We did notice numerous orange marker flags placed in the ground throughout the cemetery during our visit, which we supposed to be indicators of important features such as burials or section markers (only in retrospect did I realize they must all be marker burials), but we did not think to count them at the time.


In the absence of markers, I'm curious about how the volunteers identified burial locations. Most of the orange flags we noticed were either obviously associated with a marker, or placed in or near a depression in the ground, which is a characteristic visual indicator of a possible burial but not definite proof. Ground-penetrating radar is a common tool for locating unmarked burials, but it doesn't seem likely that the Jonesville volunteers would have used that; I say this partially because the effort didn't seem well-funded enough to have access to that kind of resource, but mostly because none of the media reports mentioned it, and shiny technology usually makes such good copy that it draws most of the focus, so the odds of its omission are pretty small.

That's a question I'm planning to ask Mt. Sinai and the Cemetery Commission.

We did notice several unengraved fieldstones, like this one, several of which had orange flags nearby. I made a mistake in assuming at the time that they were section or lot markers, since other cemeteries do use similar stones for the purpose.


For the gravestones that we were able to locate, the iconography of Jonesville Cemetery is an interesting but not especially unusual assemblage. 3 of the 10 gravestones featured a clasping-hands motif. Henry Middlebrooks (d. 1917)'s gravestone features this motif in the form of a pair of clasping hands in the foreground over a heart in the background.

My current favorite gravestone iconography resource, Stories in Stone by Douglas Keister, notes that clasped hands are traditionally a matrimonial symbol, especially if the sleeve attached to one hand appears to belong to a woman's clothing and the other to a man's; otherwise, the symbolism "can represent a heavenly welcome or an earthly farewell" (p. 108). The sleeves on both hands in Mr. Middlebrooks' engraving appear very similar and therefore probably belong to the same gender's clothing, or else the engraving is insufficiently preserved to reveal any details to the contrary. However, Keister also notes that the heart is a common matrimonial symbol in "modern tombstones," so it is difficult to draw a firm conclusion.

He was a Christian and a worthy mem
ber of the Marietta Law
and Order League.
W.M. Pack
Archon

I haven't yet succeeded in finding any information about the Marietta Law and Order League.

Like Henry Middlebrooks, Rebecca Bedford's 1908 clasped hands, the earliest of the three, bear no clear indicators of their gender, potentially due to weathering of the stone.


Ophelia Jackson (1845-1930) also has a pair of clasping hands on her gravestone, shown below a blank scroll (I have to wonder whether it was ever meant to have anything inscribed in that blank space); these are clearly a man's hand and a woman's hand; the sleeve of the hand on the viewer's left appears distinctly feminine.


The male-female pairing in this engraving may indicate matrimony or it may be a personal touch on the imagery of her farewell to a mortal loved one or her greeting by God. There is no way to be sure of either possibility, but the inscription below the dates of her birth and death reads "Faithful unto death."

OPHELIA
JACKSON
BORN JAN. 1845
DIED AT COTTAGE HILL
MARIETTA, GA.
APR. !7, 1930
"Faithful unto death"

Two of the ten Jonesville stones- Alice Bunyon (1874-1910) and Mollie Owens (1860-1902) feature images of a hand pointing upward, a symbol of the soul's ascension heavenward (Keister p. 108).


Interestingly, both images feature the same scalloped border in the circle around the hands, and the stones themselves are also remarkably similar, indicating that they may have come from the same manufacturer, eight years apart (which may have interesting implications regarding the overall business of gravestone production in the area, and on a smaller scale, may reveal something about at least one business in the community of Jonesville).


Mollie Owens's stone is very weathered, and both the image and the epitaph are very faint:

IN MEMORY TO MY
DEAR MOTHER
MOLLIE OWENS
DIED
FEB. 17, 1902
AGE 42 YRS.

Alice Bunyon's stone is much clearer:

IN MEMORY TO MY
DEAR WIFE
ALICE BUNYON

DIED
JUNE 29, 1910
AGE 36 YRS.

Given the formal similarities of the epitaphs, I'm inclined to wonder whether that's the result of the gravestones coming from the same manufacturer, or whether Mrs. Owens and Mrs. Bunyon were part of the same family.

Janie Moore's marker features the lamb iconography already discussed. Beside her, Annie Roberson's gravestone is decorated with a floral motif which is now somewhat faint.

"Write, blessed are the dead
which die in the Lord, from
henceforth, they do rest
from their labors and their
works do follow them."
Good and faithful Servant,
of Zion's travelers.

Annie Roberson's epitaph is from the instruction to John in Revelation 14:13, King James Version.

Of the remaining gravestone, L.B. and Rosa Moore's shared headstone cannot be seen on one side, and A. Beach (1834-1909) bears no iconography and a very simple epitaph.

A. BEACH
DIED
JAN. 22, 1909
AGE 75 YRS.

My husband very good-naturedly came along on this trip as my photographer; he is much more serious about photography as a hobby than I am, and as a result he's also much more experienced and knowledgeable, and thus simply better at it. Still, this was both of our first real attempt at photographing gravestones in particular, and the combination of worn and faded gravestones with dappled sunlight and shadow from overhanging trees presented an interesting challenge. Several of our pictures were taken with me looming at some awkward angle over the gravestone to shadow it evenly while Greg took the picture, sometimes standing at an awkward angle himself or shooting between my legs or under my arm to get the correct perspective for the shot.

Overall, it was a much more challenging, but much more interesting, exciting, and rewarding experience than I had planned for, and Greg was wonderfully patient about the project turning out to be larger and more involved than I had briefed him for. He's awesome like that.

So far, I've already contributed some significant documentation and a nice pile of photos to the Find-A-Grave record, which will hopefully help some genealogical researcher with his own project. I am hoping for a chance to revisit the site in December to take some measurements for a proper scale map of the cemetery; hopefully access the southern half of the property once the summer foliage has died off for the winter; pay more attention to those unmarked fieldstones; and make rubbings of the markers, once I have a few months of practice to work with. In the meantime, I have that burial listing on the way from the Cobb County Library, which will hopefully give me some more data to add to the records on Find-A-rave and my own notes; I'm also planning to contact the church and the Cemetery Commission next week for information on what work is still being done at the cemetery, what methods were used for identifying unmarked burials, and any available background information about the community.

Followup thoughts on gender

Reposted from One Day at a Time.

As soon as I finished my last post, the resulting discussion with my husband (who is much more thorough and detail-oriented than I am, and who therefore read all the comments on that Edmonton Journal article I linked) led me to find the link to this article in the sidebar. It features another Canadian couple who, beginning in the early 1990s, made a decision to that of Storm's parents to keep the sexes of their two children (both daughters, both now in their late teens) a private matter.

I rather sadly wish that I had found it before I published that last post, and I've spent the last few minutes debating whether to go back and revise.

Despite the fact that I am sitting in the emergency room at the moment, waiting for my accident-prone-Army-wife friend to get herself X-rayed (yes, the ER on post has wireless internet; I can't decide whether to be quietly grateful for this fact or alarmed that I've been here enough to know it), this article made me want to hop out of my chair and do a happy-dance.

Highlights:

"The couple also made other decisions to keep gender stereotypes out of their household while the kids were growing up. Gender-specific toys, such as Barbie dolls, were not found in the girls' toy box.

"That came more naturally, since our priority was to provide them with toys that encouraged creativity and thought (and) stereotypical toys tend not to," he said. 'In dressing them . . . the goal was not to be somehow generic, but to put them into sensible and attractive clothing in the colours we (and later they) wanted, which meant picking such clothes off whatever rack we happened to find them on.'"

Yes!

Toward the end of the article, an American psychologist named Judith Rich Harris saying "Their philosophy seems to be based on the idea that male and female are artificial categories imposed by society."

Well... exactly, in a certain sense. Denying biological gender difference, including some evolutionarily programmed behavioral tendencies, would be ludicrous, but the cultural roles we define as "male" and "female" are largely (albeit not entirely) artificial creations, and I see little point in imposing them as if they were biologically unavoidable.

Some thoughts on gender.

Reposted from One Day at a Time.

I am not as prolific a reader of blogs as many of my fellow-bloggers seem to be, which seems a little hypocritical, but I am picky about what I read and somewhat inconsistent about keeping up with things even when I mean to; my blog reading, much like my comic reading, tends to happen in fits and spurts of long neglect and catch-up marathons. Now that I think of it, that also characterizes my writing habits, so maybe it is not so hypocritical after all. Despite that, though, Powered by Osteons is a regular favorite of mine, and I was delighted today (while looking for something to do with the last hour or so of my afternoon at work now that all the work to do is done and my Dean Koontz novel is finished, much to my dismay) to find this post.

I remember the Berenstain Bears fondly from my own childhood; they were favorites whose characters were almost like friends, and remained so well after my reading level progressed past picture books. Looking back as an adult, particularly as an adult with an anthropology degree and decidedly liberal humanist ideas about gender roles and identity, I can definitely see and agree with Dr. Killgrove's point. Examined critically enough, the fact the characters are named by their roles in adult and child version of a gender dichotomy- Mama/Papa, Brother/Sister- instead of with actual names seems a little creepy.

That might be a little too critical, though. I was an avid reader of the Berenstain Bears as a child, and if there was a gender-polarized message in the books or their characters, I think anyone who knows me today would attest that I apparently missed it even on a subconscious level. I grew up with Sister Bear and her frilly pink overalls and Mama Bear and her constant long dresses- but I also grew up with me in my shorts and t-shirts and Mom in similar attire, and looking back, I think that I interpreted the Bears as what they were- fiction. Real people didn't dress that way on a regular basis any more than real anthropomorphic bears wore clothes at all or went to school (everyone knows that anthropomorphic bears are naked and illiterate). It didn't impact my worldview on any level.

If I were a parent, I would definitely be concerned about the lessons learned from, and the behaviors and norms modeled by, the Berenstain Bears and other heavily gendered children's media. I respect and admire- and would like to think that I would, if ever forced into such a situation, emulate- Dr. Killgrove's approach to dealing with those concerns. Censorship of ideas is more dangerous and more reprehensible than the ideas themselves in any case, and merely hiding children's eyes from things only leaves them naive and sheltered, rather than teaching and equipping them to evaluate ideas with their own reasoning minds. Her decision to share the books with her daughter but engage the child in critical discussion of its contents is, in my mind, brilliant and responsible.

Children's books may contain less gender-stereotyping than their toys, however. A while back, I read this article by Crystal Smith on the gendered use of vocabulary in toy advertisements. Some concerns were raised by several commenters about the author's methodology in collecting and structuring her data, and I have some concerns about her classification system, but personally, I found the study's subjective observations far more compelling than its quantitative aspects anyway.

The author notes that toys clearly marketed at boys- toys with primarily or solely boys in their commercials, for instance- tend to be related to non-domestic work roles (dump trucks, construction and tool playsets), driving, or fighting (action figures, toy guns), while toys clearly marketed toward girls- toys with primarily or solely girls in their commercials, for instance- tend to be related to domestic work roles (toy vacuums, kitchen playsets), fashion and cosmetics, or nurturing (baby dolls). Smith, author of The Achilles Effect (which, as a disclaimer, I have not read), writes from the perspective of concern that this sort of marketing is harmful because it promotes aggression to young boys, so she touches only lightly on its effect on girls.

The issue for me is that most of what she classifies as "fighting" toys are either linked to TV shows or movies with actual storylines and at least somewhat developed characters, meant to be used in active play (chasing each other around with Nerf guns, for instance), or both. The girls' toys, in contrast, are mostly sedentary (vacuuming notwithstanding) and seldom linked to a familiar plot or developed characters. Boys, therefore, gain some things from their conventionally encouraged forms of play that girls are being steered away from.

Smith's reply to a comment on her article accurately observes that "The characteristics of these toys, which are masculinised by names and pronouns, also hew to stereotypes—they are about fighting and working (although the Big Rigs do sing and dance, which are not actions one would expect from a big bulky truck.) Compare the “purpose” of these toys with that of the girls’ toys who are predominantly female and designed to be accessorized or cuddled, but not much else. Most do not have jobs and they don’t fight."

The stereotype at work here seems to extend into adult life. In the workplace, women have achieved approximate parity with men in general, with exceptions in specific fields which are changing as we speaking- yet in nearly every television sitcom I have seen recently (more than I care to admit- see below) I have noticed that the female leads are more likely to be stay-at-home moms with working husbands, usually in couples who don't appear to actually share any hobbies or common interests outside of the children (in whom the husband is usually mostly disinterested). In fact, in most of these fictional families, the man is the only one who has apparent outside interests or is able to pursue them.

Women are generally stereotyped as being uninterested in sports, video games, comics, cars, etc.- essentially, in anything not about hair, makeup, housework, babies, or feelings. In my own life, I am frequently met with surprise when a new acquaintance learns that I am a female gamer / sci-fi fan / comic reader / firearms enthusiast (although several recent studies indicate that I am not that unusual in regard to gaming, and Felicia Day is giving us all a kickass example). It still seems that the societal expectation, perpetuated by our toys, is that while both boys and girls can work, in our off time, the boys get to have hobbies and the girls are supposed to be interested only in looking pretty and being nurturing. That's a terrifying thought, as it seems to encourage girls to be less than full-developed, well-rounded people. One of the comments on Smith's article says, "Adventure and imaginative play are where it’s at. I think that’s really what any child wants, regardless of gender." Amen.

All in all, I think the general message here is that society may be pushing gender roles, especially in terms of interests and likes or dislikes, on children much too early. We tend to leave the TV in the funeral home office on during the day for background noise. As a result, I've seen full runs of three or four TV sitcoms in the last year which I otherwise would have ignored totally if left to my own devices (see above). Thus, I have twice viewed an episode of Yes, Dear in which the main character's mother upbraids her daughter-in-law because the main character's infant daughter is dressed "like a boy." She insists on taking the child out to buy some girlier clothes so that total strangers can look at her and tell that she is female. Although the mother-in-law character is meant to be obnoxious and overbearing, like her stereotypical counterparts, I still find the episode to be the philosophical equivalent of nails on a chalkboard.

For one thing, the kid is still in a stroller. I realize that gender identification is a big part of how we humans navigate social interaction, but when dealing with a child who is still stumbling across the threshold from infant to toddler, is it really that important to know if the child is a boy or a girl? Will it really affect how an adult interacts with the child? More importantly, should it? I find the idea either absurd or troubling, depending on the answers to those questions.

Besides, I personally viewed the child's clothing as gender-neutral, which perhaps raises a whole other set of issues. I can walk around town in most of my husband's clothes, and though I might look a little frumpy since they're mostly all a little baggy on me, I'm not going to look exceptionally odd, and probably no one is going to declare me a cross-dresser; if he were to walk around in a random selection of my clothes, though, he's got about a fifty percent chance of standing out in most people's perception as crossing a clear gender boundary, regardless of whether those people approve or disapprove of that action. "Masculine" styles are more frequently seen as potentially unisex or neutral, but overtly "feminine" styles are more clearly gender-polarized.

It was after viewing that episode of Yes, Dear that I heard about the Stocker-Witterick household in Canada who recently made the apparently controversial decision to keep their newborn child's sex a secret from everyone outside its immediate family, to shield the kid from the sorts of pressures and biases I have just been going on about. Dr. Killgrove's blog post includes a link to a statement on the matter by Mrs. Witterick herself; interestingly, her five-year-old son raised the initial question that led to the family's decision. I'm not sure I would do it myself, but I honestly think it's a pretty cool idea and I'm curious to see where it leads.

Flowers and seashells

Reposted from One Day at a Time.

A few days ago, I was setting up our chapel here at the funeral home for a visitation, carrying flowers from the delivery room in the back of our building, across the hall to arrange them on stands near the casket at the front of the chapel.

It reminded me of another afternoon of carrying flowers, early on in my time here, when I remarked to my boss that the arrangement I had in my arms, and could barely see over the top of, smelled nice. He growled back something along the lines of "They're damn funeral flowers. They never smell nice."

Maybe I haven't been in this business long enough to be jaded, because I still think they're pretty. Then again, I'm a little strange. The whole issue reminds me of doing human remains detection with my canine SAR team in Crystal Beach after Hurricane Ike.

The relatively undamaged elementary school- a big, sturdy building built on huge concrete pylons- where our base of operations had been established was less than a quarter of a mile from the beach.


We had been working the bay side of the peninsula all morning, pretty enough underneath the debris, but plagued by homicidal biting flies that make me itch even now just thinking about them and bordered by the muddy, silty, unappealing banks of the channel, and I hadn't been to the beach in over a year at that point, not since the last coast trip with the Sailing Club back in college. There was no way in hell I was going to be that close and not at least see the ocean, disaster zone or not.

It's bad policy, in a disaster zone, to just go strolling off by yourself. There could be any number of hazards, human and otherwise, and even if you're impervious to damage, like me, it creates a lot of undue stress for those responsible for keeping track of people. So, a teammate- herself a product of the coast, just a different coast- walked down to the beach with me. I've never seen the water at Bolivar look so clear and clean; it was as though the storm had washed it free of the usual combination of Mississippi River silt burden and industrial filth that produced the familiar grayish brown murk I remembered.


A few seagulls had begun to return; we had seen the first few on the ferry crossing, and my team leader declared them a sign of hope. Even with bare foundations and shattered homes in the background, the beach was more beautiful than I had ever seen it.

Perhaps it was so beautiful because of the destruction in the background, because the contrast emphasized that peace and serenity had returned, that the Gulf's fury could wash away everything human hands had made, but not beauty and light.

I always pick up seashells at the beach. Usually I just find one or two in a stroll, a small memento of the day's trip. Most of the ones in my collection, until recently, I could still assign to a specific memory, a specific outing. This one from the afternoon at Follett's Island with my parents on Mother's Day my last year in high school (the day I wrote a haiku about), these from a motorcycle outing with Daddy, and that one from the afternoon my college roommates and I decided to try surfing and I broke my toe.

I have discovered that seashell-hunting with Greg is a larger-scale operation entirely, and the last time we went to the beach, I may have had to whine and throw a tantrum to get the man out onto the beach with me, but once he got there he was insatiable, and we left with two plastic drinking cups full of shells.

I love my husband. Speaking of light in the darkness, he is mine.

Thus, as the sun was setting over Bolivar Peninsula, at the end of a long day of slogging through marshes and brush, and over debris that that once been homes, looking for and not finding the missing dead, I literally skipped over to my team leader, who was as weary and filthy and stinky as I was, and cheerfully announced, "Look, Fearless Leader! I found seashells."

He looked at me like I was nuts, and maybe I am, but you've got to cope somehow.

We were sitting around here at work the other day, talking about people's reaction to our occupation (the funeral director I share an office with says that she has heard people rudely unwilling to eat anything she baked for her church once they found out what she did for a living, and the girls at the local car wash are apparently annoyingly reluctant to wash the funeral coach when it's brought in). My office-mate told me that someone interviewed her and our boss shortly after she came here, and asked her if working at the funeral home made her sad.

I suppose I can understand the question, but for me the funeral home is not a sad place. The sadness- the moment of loss- happens elsewhere. This is a place for grieving, yes, but that grieving is the beginning of the healing process, and the service we provide, at its most fundamental level, is to facilitate the beginnings of healing. This isn't a place of sadness; it is a place of coping, of comfort, of eventual hope.

That's the underlying purpose of human remains detection, too- to bring closure, and sometimes justice, so that that process of grief and healing and life can begin more easily for those we help.

Part of my role in that, and part of my role in life in general, is to find the bright spots amid the darkness, the moments of levity amid rubble and the beauty in a rite of mourning. The world is full of death, darkness, and destruction, which I walk in by choice to do what good I can, but the seashells and the clear ocean are still beautiful, and the flowers still smell sweet.


It would never be worth it, otherwise.

Always check the shoes.

Reposted from One Day at a Time.

My friend Sarah posted a link to this MSNBC slideshow this morning. When I looked at it then, one of the first few pictures was an image of a little girl's white shoe sitting forlornly on the pavement, with piles of rubble and debris in the background (I've been through all four slideshows now, hoping to find the picture again to post it here, but it must have been moved).

Seeing that shoe brought back a lot of memories of the search for human remains on the Texas coast after Hurricane Ike back in 2008.

The debris piles contained a lot of small personal items; when you hear about "debris piles," you think of pieces of buildings, downed trees, but it's too easy to forget about all the small everyday things that make up our lives: books, toys, knickknacks, clothing. The psychological impact of seeing such mundane, fundamentally human items tossed about and abandoned that way was worse than seeing homes reduced to debris and even worse than the knowledge that the residents might still be under there somewhere. It was jarring, poignant, and sad.

I remember finding several picture frames and photo albums; always, we went through those albums page by page, hoping to find at least one picture to perhaps return to a family for some small measure of comfort, but every time the pictures had been either torn out by the water or disintegrated. Walking through the remains of homes on Bolivar, I had to fight the urge to pick up all the sad-looking children's toys among the debris and leave them somewhere sheltered but visible where a returning child might find them. We marvelled, though, at the sight of glass Christmas ornaments somehow intact, nestled among boards and nails and shingles, and my team leader told the story of the crystal clock he found, intact and upright, in a table in a flooded-out home in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

Most of our work took place in a county on the mainland, across Galveston Bay from the low-lying barriers of Galveston Island and Bolivar Peninsula which caught the brunt of Ike's landfall. Across the thirty-mile length of the bay and seven miles inland, we found pieces of homes from Bolivar and Galveston carried there by the storm surge. The majority of what made it across the bay and the prairie were lighter, more buoyant items- wooden housing components including a whole porch and section of wall, refrigerators and water heaters, lightbulbs and Christmas ornaments almost miraculously intact, whole flocks of carved wooden pelicans that the local sheriffs collected and tossed into the backs of ATVs swearing they were worth something, boats, foam kickboards and surfboards and life vests, buoys...

...and shoes.

Early on, while we were still working on Bolivar (I have looked and looked for Diamond Street every time I have been back there, and I don't know if it lost its street sign or was destroyed, but I've never found it again), my team leader told me to check the shoes to be certain they were empty. The human ankle joint, much like its counterpart in the wrist, does not articulate as securely as certain others, so hands and feet disarticulate and detach with relative ease. The added buoyancy of a shoe could easily have allowed a foot to be carried across the expanse of water by the storm surge. Police in Canada have seen ample evidence of this.

It became part of my job in the field, in addition to pulling smelly dogs out of even smellier water, carrying extra supplies, and watching for alligators, to flip over any shoes we found in the debris piles and check for feet. There is no tension quite like seeing a pair of children's shoes laying together, upside down, in a pile of debris, and no relief quite like turning them over to find them empty, with a plastic zip-tie with the store's tag attached still holding them together.

Part of a shoe store must have gotten washed up in that area, because all along that section of the debris pile, we found several more pairs of shoes still bound together, mostly upside-down, and it kept us on edge for a while even after we figured out what must have happened.

We never found a shoe that was not empty, nor in fact any actual human remains on that side of the bay, but the memory stays with me, so strongly that to this day, even in my own apartment, if I see a shoe lying upside down, I reflexively kick it over and look inside.

Why am I never following that guy and his dog through anything nice?

Reposted from One Day at a Time.

I emerged from my nice warm bed this morning to discover that the Decepticon Maxima's windshield was frozen over with such a thick layer of ice that attempts at scraping it off didn't do more than scuff up the glossy surface of the ice a bit. I tried to get into the car to turn the defroster on, only to discover that the door handle was coated with as much ice as the rest of the car and the door itself was frozen shut. Shivering, I shuffled around to the passenger side of the car, which thanks to being to leeward, hadn't gotten quite as thickly coated. I managed to tug the passenger door open and scoot over into the driver's seat. I was still half an hour late to work, because it took me that long to manage to scrape off a 6inx6in porthole in the ice so I could see enough to drive, very slowly, and then I had to stop halfway there, because the frozen precipitation kept hitting the windshield and freezing there, blocking what little view I had.

Not one of my brighter decisions, honestly, but it's all backroads on the way to work, and I think most of the rest of this town was sensible enough to stay home, especially since they declared a late-reporting day on the base and that place accounts for most of the traffic here. I got to work, and an hour later my boss decided to send us all home for the day because the weather was steadily worsening. Back into the car, more windshield-scraping, and another slow nerve-wracking drive home, and now I'm warm and comfy, looking forward to a whole day off.

I desperately need one, too. It's been a long few days.

Sunday was entirely my fault.

After clearing that chilly but uneventful dive mission on Saturday morning, I was looking forward to the rest of my weekend. I managed to go home and change and spent a pleasant afternoon with my grandma's neighbor (who is also married to a soldier; her husband is due home this week, yay for them!) learning a new recipe and chatting over a glass of wine while we baked.

I had just gotten home, intending to curl up with a good book for a little while and maybe throw together a followup post about that dive mission (this one was written on-scene on my phone), when my phone rang; when I answered, my SAR team leader greeted me with, "Hey, we're in (insert neighboring county here). What are you doing tomorrow?"

"Well, Fearless Leader," I replied, "I guess I'm driving to (insert neighboring county here). What've we got?"

The answer turned out to be a missing toddler; operations had switched to recovery mode and active searching was set to resume at 0700. It was a long drive, so in the interest of not having to leave my apartment at 0400 to get there, I decided to drive up that night and bunk with everyone else in the elementary school gym, where the Red Cross had set up a very comfortable (by search standards) set of living quarters for the searchers.

I got there about 2300, in time to catch a quick briefing from my team leader and the leader of another local team (well, local back before I moved two hours away to be with Greg and work at the funeral home) who was running the canine part of the incident. We had cots in the gym, so I was spared the hassle of getting Greg's spare Army cot out of the trunk and figuring how to set it up in the dark without waking those who had already gone to sleep- I just tossed my sleeping bag and pillow onto an empty cot and settled in.

See, one of the few perks about my husband being in the Army is that he occasionally brings me home spare gear, since he knows I can use it for SAR and he's awesome and supportive like that.

So I have one of those wonderful Army sleeping bags that, if you zip the two layers together, is apparently perfectly comfortable down to about -40f. Well, Greg says that unless it actually is that cold, you really don't want both layers; one can stand alone for slightly warmer temperatures and one is just a liner. Apparently in my rush out the door, I grabbed the liner instead of the sleeping bag proper, because when Fearless Leader tapped me on the shoulder to wake me up in the morning, I was curled up at the bottom of the sleeping bag with my head somewhere near my knees and my pillow pulled into the sleeping bag after me to close off the opening. It was cold.

I also jumped about three feet and tried to come up swinging but my arms were still in the sleeping bag. And I screamed. I am too used to sleeping alone.

We spent the day slogging through a lot of areas that I think are eventually intended to become residential developments but which are presently occupied by lots of really nasty dense brush. Some of it came up to my shoulders, not that that takes much, and I actually carried my hiking stick, which I usually don't do because I like having my hands free, just for the sake of having something to knock the stuff aside with. That didn't do much good with those damn mesquite thorns, though, and my hands are still all scratched up. I need to learn to wield a machete properly.

Oh, and there were open manholes scattered around, which thanks to the brush, you couldn't see until they were right under you.

Why am I never following that old man and his border collie through anything pleasant?

I say that on every search.

It could have been worse, though. Nothing we have ever waded through, except maybe those six-foot drifts of reeds and dead cows, has ever been nearly as rough as Goat Island after Hurricane Ike.

Anyway, it was a good mission.

The case itself was really sad, of course; recoveries are always a little sad, and situations involving kids are hard for everyone, but you learn to look at these things a little more philosophically after a while, and it becomes bearable.

Dad, who is himself a former EMT, once commented that it must be difficult finding all these people dead and not being able to save any of them. I told him that it's actually a little easier to take, emotionally. That probably sounds weird if you've never done this, but there's something less wrenching about going out to look for someone you already know is dead, than trying to save someone and failing. Even in EMS, sometimes someone's fate is actually up to your decisions, your actions, and your skills, but often it's not. Often that person is going to die no matter what you or seven better medics or Dr. Red Duke the God of Trauma himself try to do about it- and you learn to accept that to an extent, but not completely, or at least I never did. There's still a sense of guilt, of failure, of wondering what you could have done differently or if someone else could have made the difference.

With recovery missions, I know that the person's fate was totally out of my hands; it's sad, but the sense of guilt and loss and failure isn't there.

Not finding the body, like this weekend, is another matter. My first mission ever, we went home without making a recovery, and it was really hard for me to take. It later turned out that the information available had led the search effort to be directed at the wrong area. I've finally come to accept that no matter how much we want to give the family closure and/or help justice to be done and/or give the deceased the basic human dignity of a proper disposition, you simply can't find what isn't there. It's just something you have to accept.

It really was a good search though- multiple canine teams worked together smoothly and cordially the whole way through, and on Sunday we were even fielding in integrated units, with members of two or three different teams in the field together. I've never seen that happen on a search before, and it was really great to see that everyone was willing to work together that way and put the mission first; it's something I hope to see more of. We worked with some really great people out there, and I'm hoping we can repeat that too. As much as the case itself was the sort of thing that could totally destroy all faith in humanity, the nature of the response could do a lot to restore it.

Anyway, I say that was my fault, because I left the dive mission on Saturday feeling guilty for standing around the command trailer all day, taking a couple of notes for the dive log, and then eating the nice hot lunch the Salvation Army lady brought us. I felt like a superfluous waste of resources- so of course the universe had to toss us another mission so I could make up for it.

It was late on Sunday night when I got home, and Monday I walked right into a busy day at work, most of which I got through accompanied by a persistent icepicks-in-the-eyeballs headache. At twenty minutes until 1700 that afternoon, I was almost desperately looking forward to going home and taking a nap- and then the phone rang.

See a pattern here?

A friend's baby was very sick and she needed to go the ER, so off we went and didn't get home until a little past time to collapse into bed, headache and all.

Yesterday was a nice recuperative day; most of the day at work was spent reading, and most of the evening was spent napping and taking a bubble bath and finally getting to enjoy the avocado I bought for myself Saturday afternoon.

And now I have a day off!

I think I shall write the second chapter of this story. It seems fitting, because the events that take place in the second chapter are centered on the day being the anniversary of something, and today is, strangely enough, the anniversary of the real-life basis for that.

Perhaps that someone's way of telling me that now is the time.

Field notes

Reposted from One Day at a Time.

It's a cold morning, though one of the warmest we've had all week- forty degrees according to the form I filled out when we arrived on scene, but with a stiff cold wind out of the west-southwest. There is still snow on the ground in the shady places and the edges of the little cove near the boat ramp where we've set up IC.

The actual dive site is around the peninsula to our north, and the support crew are all huddled here, keeping scene logs by radio and waiting to help warm and hydrate the divers as they return by boat.

The generator for the command trailer spent the hour of the morning sputtering and dying every few minutes, and it's cut off entirely now. We were using the gas stove in the trailerfor heat, carbon monoxide be damned, but we gave up on that, and now we're standing around a police car, using it for a base radio and the trailer as a windbreak.

Just waiting. It's unusual not being at the dive site to tend and count bubbles and document things in person, but every operation is different and we adapt well.

Us civilians are listening to the two cops on the support crew swapping stories, waiting for word from the dive crew. Documentation is my job today.

Obviously we're doing a lot of waiting, since I have time to write this. When we get busy it's urgent, but there's a lot of downtime, especially on this end.

Brrr. I'm glad I wore my husband's wool socks today.