The people you find in lost graveyards: review of The Dead Die Twice
From Atlantic Books Today, spring 2023, issue 97.
People wind up in cemeteries for all sorts of reasons. For the dead, it’s often carved right into the gravestone. For the living, the rationale is sometimes harder to tease out.
Steve Skafte visits abandoned cemeteries on a journey of discovery. He pins down the exact locations of old, overgrown resting places. He clears tangles of brambles obscuring tiny memorials of children. He uprights toppled stones. He rubs snow into the lettering of weathered memorials to reveal the stories of how the dead wound up there.
The Dead Die Twice collects Skafte’s photos and thoughts as he explores 20 lost cemeteries across Nova Scotia. It’s a window into an ongoing daily writing project Skafte began in 2007. He explores what he calls the “forgotten history” of the province, photographs his discoveries, and pens intensely personal reflections on the process.
“There are thousands upon thousands of gravestones abandoned in Nova Scotia, far more than I’d ever imagined,” he writes. “If I spent my life intently searching for nothing else, I’d never visit them all. This is something few people can conceive of, how the woods are alive with the dead and their stories.”
The book chronicles one year’s exploration, organized by seasons, capturing the cycles of life, death and renewal among the elements slowly reclaiming these burying places. Skafte’s lens beautifully captures the moss enveloping the tombs, the winter freeze and thaw that cracks their stones, and emerald shoots framing white marble stones tumbled to the ground in spring.
Skafte snaps a photograph of himself at each cemetery; sometimes propping up a gravestone or running his hand along some eroded text to help decipher it. He puts himself in the narrative, reminiscing about a lonely childhood as he stands over the graves of children who died long ago from fevers and misadventure.
Skafte’s focus on the personal and poetic might frustrate history and genealogy buffs, two other sorts who wind up in cemeteries for their own reasons. But he also includes the GPS coordinates of each location for anyone looking to investigate these places themselves.
The Dead Die Twice takes its title from a sentiment that’s been attributed to everyone from Banksy to the ancient Egyptians: that we die first when our heart stops beating – and a second time when our name is never spoken again. Or, as Skafte writes in the book’s opening pages:
“The dead die twice
first for the living
then again in the forgetting”
That’s what draws Skafte past the edge of the clearing and deep into the woods. It’s the secret longing that motivates anyone who writes down their thoughts and shares them with anyone else. We don’t want to be forgotten. Skafte wants these people, these places – and himself – to be remembered and understood.
He writes: “Everyone wants their bones laid low, but nobody wants to sink their story with them.”
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