Cemeteries’ focus: works of mercy
People who come to work at Holy Cross Cemetery in Colma tend to stay either for a year or for a very long time, says Kathy Atkinson, cemeteries director for the Archdiocese of San Francisco.
Those who stay, she says, understand that working for a Catholic cemetery is not an ordinary service job – it is a ministry.
The idea of ministry came up time and again during a recent interview with Atkinson and a tour of the 300-acre cemetery, which is known for its serene Holy Cross Mausoleum built in 1921 and as the resting place of such luminaries as Joe DiMaggio.
“We’re here as a ministry,” said Atkinson, who also oversees the two other archdiocesan cemeteries, Holy Cross in Menlo Park and Mt. Olivet in San Rafael. “The corporal works of mercy – burial of the dead – and the spiritual works of mercy – praying for the dead: that’s what Catholic cemeteries are all about. We’re charged with that by Jesus.”
Atkinson works to make sure her ministry at the principal cemetery in the Archdiocese is one of consistent quality. For example, she has a rule that bereaved families who come to the office asking about services must see a counselor within 10 minutes, regardless of what else the staff might be working on.
“Whoever comes in the door, they’re going to be told the same thing no matter who they talk with,” Atkinson said. “If there’s no counselor available, they get one of the supervisors, including me.”
Holy Cross does not charge a commission for its services.
“If somebody has no money, we bury them for free,” she says. “They have to be a Catholic or have some relationship with the Catholic community.”
Holy Cross does not charge interest on funds loaned to purchase products, which can cost up to $10,000 to $28,000 for a two-person crypt in All Saints Mausoleum, the newer of the cemeteries two mausoleums.
The revenues to support the cemetery come from two main sources: rents paid by flower growers and other tenants on the cemetery’s 100 acres of leased land, and payments by families for contracts spelling out their funeral and burial wishes in advance.
This year has been the toughest financially in Atkinson’s 23 years at the cemetery. The reason in part is that fewer families are buying pre-need contracts. The squeeze is being felt industry-wide, with revenues down 10 percent across the country.
“With today’s economy people don’t want to deal with their burial arrangements ahead of time,” Atkinson said.
Atkinson climbed into the driver’s seat of one of the electric vehicles workers use for transportation around the grounds. She took off over the winding paths, casting her eye here and there for anything amiss in this neighborhood where 380,000 people have been laid to rest since 1887.
Arriving at one location where a service was about to begin, she removed a Halloween poster someone had put up. Then, she wondered aloud to a maintenance worker about the decorative blue glass installed at the base of several trees. And finally she pointed out two children’s drawings that had been taped to the marble front of one burial site.
The tape damages the surface, Atkinson said. She discourages families from leaving such mementoes, because too many can become a problem.
Leaving the area she waved at the lead car of an oncoming funeral procession and turned uphill. Her next step was a lawn marked in the center by three crosses. Buried here are the remains of 40,000 San Franciscans the Archdiocese relocated from Mt. Calvary Cemetery after burials were banned in the city.
Atkinson turned uphill and parked in front of the 1921 chapel. The chapel remains popular, and a few minutes inside its quiet, twilit, vaulting interior explain why. Around the center are the crypts of the archbishops of San Francisco, and family burial vaults are set into the walls.
Driving downhill Atkinson passed an area dedicated to archdiocesan priests and their families, and another for priests who are veterans of military service. She paused at DiMaggio’s grave, its stone engraved with a rose twining around a cross and numerous baseballs and bats having been placed at the foot of the monument.
A thought Atkinson kept returning to was the necessity for a family to grieve and to place its loved one to rest in a manner that suits a family’s tradition. For the DiMaggio family it was a simply but beautifully engraved stone, and for others it is a crypt.
More than one in four burials at Holy Cross are of cremated remains. The Catholic Church has allowed cremation since Vatican II, but often there is confusion about how cremated remains should be treated.
The answer is that they should be treated as sacred, the same as uncremated remains. Cremation changes the body before burial, but when people confuse it with a disposition the results can be quite sad.
“We need to educate our people that cremation is OK,” Atkinson said. “To me the saddest ones are the cremated remains that come down with nobody. We call them delivery-only.”
Atkinson’s ideal in that situation would be a Mass and burial attended by loved ones, and a marker to preserve the memory.
“It’s important to know who your ancestors are,” she said. “It’s important to know you existed. It’s not only respect for the body as home to soul but respect for us as human beings.”
(By Rick DelVecchio)
