“The Cemetery Woman”: Collector of Death, Book Coming Soon

In Helen Sclair’s dining room are coffins: one from the 1940s fit for a baby, a wicker model from the 1920s and a Civil War-era pine casket.

A copper-lined burial vault adorns her living room, and on her walls are the death mask from a notorious Depression-era Chicago bank robber and paraphernalia from Day of the Dead and Qingming, Mexican and Chinese festivals that involve decorating ancestral graves.

“People seem to be somewhat afraid of death,” said Sclair, a 78-year-old widow who adores it and is known locally as the cemetery lady, “But if you look closely, you’d be amazed at what you’ll find in cemeteries. You step back in time, and you cross oceans.”

Sclair sang opera as a young woman and taught kids with learning disabilities in inner city Chicago. The death of her husband, some 30 years ago, led to a fascination with Chicago’s cemetery history. “It was just total idle curiosity,” she said, “something to fill the time on weekends.”

When Sclair took a bad fall ten years ago, her daughter suggested moving to a one floor home or an elevator building. Sclair scoffed at the idea, and instead, called the Bohemian National Cemetery, on the north side of Chicago, and asked for a home. After a nod from the board of directors, Sclair moved into one of three simple cottages on the property. “It’s been wonderful,” she said, “I live with death on a daily basis.”

Sclair may be unique, but an adoration of cemeteries cuts across the country. Mount Auburn Cemetery, a vast plot of rolling hills, gardens and graves, just outside Boston, was America’s first designed public green space, built in 1831, and attracts 200,000 visitors a year. Birders come early on mornings in April and May; nearby office workers walk during lunch hour and organized tours focus on horticulture, graves of famous children’s book authors, angel motifs on monuments, native woodland restoration, healing qualities of medicinal plants and nighthawks.“I think the major reason people come here is because it is so beautiful,” said Piper Morris, vice president of development at Mount Auburn. “Once you get inside you’re not even aware you’re in the city.”

Mount Auburn inspired other garden cemeteries across the country, such as Laurel Hill Cemetery, in Philadelphia, and Oakwood Cemetery, in Troy, New York, as well as green spaces sans headstones, like New York City’s Central Park.

Notable Mount Auburn burials include Louis Agassiz, a 19th century Swiss geologist who was the first scientist to propose that earth had been subject to a past ice age, Fannie Farmer, a turn of the 20th century cookbook author, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, a 19th century American poet renown for his lyricism. Also buried in Mount Auburn are a large number of Armenians, an immigrant group that still populates the surrounding neighborhood of Watertown.

The ethnography of cemeteries across Chicagoland is the subject of a book Sclair is currently working on. Bohemian, where she lives, was founded in 1877, after a Catholic priest denied burial in the Bohemian-Polish Catholic cemetery to one Marie Silhanek. Irked, the Bohemians, led by a newspaper editor named Frank Zdrubek, founded their own cemetery.

Now, Muslims, Assyrians, Romanians and Bohemians are all buried there.

“Everyone seems to be getting along quite famously,” said Sclair.