Beauty in the Breakdown
It's funny how circumstances lead you to the most bizarre interests. I don't talk about this much with anyone, but ever since my mother died when I was in high school, I have harboured a mild obsession with death and the past. I don't want to die and don't have suicidal thoughts and the like, but I just seem to gravitate towards an interest in memorials of the dead, monuments (tombs, mausoleums, cemeteries, churchyards), stories of haunted places, churches, etc.
Being interested in archaeology and history helps to feed this insatiable interest more than you can possibly know. Every time we work at a site that has an abandoned house, I always feel a strong desire to go inside and see the rooms that these people lived in, that is, if the site is linked with the original owners of the house in anyway.
Recently at work the company was hired to do an assessment of a family mausoleum that had been discovered on property which was the once the home of a very prominent early Toronto family. Of course the majority of the land is a subdivision now and has been for many years, but the demolition of a more modern house revealed the tomb. There were no bodies inside -- they had been removed to Mount Pleasant in the 1920s, a wish expressed in a will from the last living family member that if the property fell out of the family's possession, the bodies would be removed to a new family mausoleum in an established cemetery.
The weird thing is that from the 1920s until now, the location of this family mausoleum had been lost even though historical archives recorded it's presence on the original property. I guess it's not that hard to lose track of something in 80 or so years, especially with a subdivision subsequently built on the land. More than anything, this story made me realize how much history I don't know about my own city.
For the rest of the year I resolve to become a tourist at home. I'll sign up with Heritage Toronto to get a membership and free access to historical sites, and I'll just go around to these places when I want to. You can join me if you want or maybe follow my little odyssey in photos; there will definitely be photos.
However, for the time being to end this post by coming full circle, I've been trawling Flickr for the past hour looking at interesting photos of cemeteries and graves and this one caught my eye. It's just... beautifully haunting.
posted by D. at 10:32 a.m.
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