The Grin Reaper's Summer Vacation (1998)

San Francisco and its celebrated cemetery in Mission Dolores

Death rarely takes a holiday, but every now and then I do! Last year, rather than an exotic international location, I decided to visit one of our country's most beautiful destinations: San Francisco. For me, San Francisco and New Orleans are the two most intriguing cities our nation has to offer; each with its own distinct personality. I hadn't been to San Francisco since 1976, when I drove there in my rusty old VW Beetle, and felt it was high time I had returned.

San Francisco is not a big cemetery city. In fact, there are only two cemeteries and one crematorium within the City limits (because of an extremely limited amount of available land, burials are no longer permitted within the City). Therefore, the biggest, most popular cemetery in the area, is south of the San Francisco in Colma. Colma, amusingly enough, has the distinction of having more dead residents, than living souls, within its city limits.

The cemetery I chose to visit though, is located well within San Francisco's city limits: the Mission Dolores Church (Catholic; built in 1776), at 16th and Dolores Streets. This small, but colorful, cemetery features a life-size statue of Father Junipero Sera, the Founder and First President of the California Mission, and a wide variety of trees, shrubs, vines, perennials, and succulents.

There's a helpful diagram of the grounds as you enter, which will assist you in locating headstones, as well as plantings. As much an arboretum as a cemetery, the grounds include brilliantly-colored flowers (birds-of-paradise, sage, roses, wild lilac, lily-of-the-Nile, and pride of Madeira) and a diversity of trees (Japanese maple, juniper, Canary Island palm, English yew, Southern magnolia, and Italian cyprus).

The cemetery at Mission Dolores is a botanical delight with its brilliant orange birds-of-paradise and a colorful array of roses.

A statue of Kateri Tekakwitha, Our Lady of the Mohawk, commemorates "Faithful Indians.

I loved the image on this tombstone of an angel laying flowers at a grave. This memorial is for a young woman, a native of Ireland. The tree next to her stone is an English yew.

One last San Francisco/cemetery item: the old Golden Gate Cemetery, once located at Clement and 33rd Streets, is currently the Lincoln Golf Course. Some of the buried had been moved from their "final resting places," but many bodies actually still remain beneath the turf! (I wonder what's par for this corpse?)

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