To Mount Pleasant Cemetery, for a walk

We don’t do enough to honour the cultural and historical significance of cemeteries in this city. This can begin with detailed documentation and publicly accessible information, but that appears to be beyond us. What’s preventing some city of Toronto bright spark staffer, or god forbid, the Mount Pleasant Cemetery itself, from designing a publicly accessible, downloadable map of the prominent graves of Mount Pleasant? Their website has a search gizmo, but only if you already know who’s buried there and search by the full name can you find the location. The notable figure search option has a drop-down menu of last names only. Unless you’ve done your homework, you have to rely on your own gumshoe skill and serendipity. 

St. James Cemetery could use the same; I still can’t find the Robert Baldwin tombstone there and I emailed everybody and their pet at St. James with the question. You’d presume that the St. James Cathedral, the owner of the cemetery, would care about these things and have resources for them? You’d presume wrong. Is it, like the residents of the Toronto islands, that they just don’t like too many people visiting?

But back to the Mount Pleasant. I just return from a long ramble through the historic cemetery with an old friend and while he manually wrote in the names of interest into the map that he got off the website, we found numerous other things that we weren’t aware might interest us. 

We failed to find Egerton Ryerson’s tombstone, although we had the lot number. We had no idea what it looked like and after running around in circles, we gave up.

On our way there, we did pass a Stratas family grave that mentions the children of the deceased, one of whom is Teresa. I expect these are Teresa Stratas’ parents? Would Teresa be buried here when the time comes? (She is now in her eighties and lives in Florida.) There is a lot of space for children’s names on the tombstone left. 

Former Prime Minister and Justice Minister in the Trudeau Sr government, John Turner’s grave was on our list and we found it far away from the road, under the trees, still new-looking (erected in 2020) and fairly modest, as PM graves go. We were surprised to discover that his son died soon after him, much too young at 52.

On our way back, we came across Peter Worthington’s grave, with a cheerful dog statue next to it. War correspondent, columnist and founder of the Sun, Worthington is Danielle Crittenden’s father and obvi David Frum’s father-in-law, so here’s Frum’s The Daily Beast obit for his FIL from 2013.

Another PM, all the way across and to the north, William Lyon McKenzie King has a more prominently marked grave, with 2 or 3 explanatory plaques around it and a sort of narrow, plain family grave behind his individual one. It is near the road and hard to miss.

It’s very hard to find, on the other hand, the grave of one of the most prominent Canadian artists of the twentieth century, Glenn Gould. There’s a Gould family tombstone in the middle of a busy lot, naming his mother first (d. 1975), his father (the last of the three of them to go) and then Gould (d. ‘82) at the bottom of the stone. At an unexpected angle to the family tomb, some couple of meters out front, there’s a flat stone for Glenn only, a small plain square with a piano shape carved around the name and a few bars of (my friend is certain) Goldberg Variations, but you can’t really tell, weather and time haven’t treated it gently. That Gould’s official tombstone would start with his mother first (ahem) and have this little flat square closer to the neighbouring grave just for Glenn… tells a story, I suppose. 

Not too far from that lot, we visited the round Forest Scattering Garden, which is a bit of dark forest surrounded by the circular road, hiding a handful of entities that look like Canada Post mailboxes. You look closer, and discover that they hold memorial plaques which are small rectangles with names and years of birth and death (or death only). Were all these people cremated and then scattered among those trees? We concluded that yes, that must be the case. Northrop Frye, another prominent Canadian of the twentieth century, was supposed to be there. We looked and looked and looked and found some other people (both of Margaret Atwood’s parents, for example, in the top row of names on one of those boxy entities). Finally on one of the boxy things near the edge of the circle I found Frye’s name all the way down, next-to-last row, alongside his first wife. 

Until mid-twenty-teens, some good soul used to publish chosen excerpts from Frye’s secondary writing on a WordPress blog called The Educated Imagination. It’s there that I found a bunch of relevant notes about Helen, and Frye remembering Helen, but also his thoughts on entering an “Elizabethan age” i.e. marrying a woman called Elizabeth some years later. For there was another marriage, which was given much less time: two years after Helen’s death in ‘86, Frye married Elizabeth Eedy Brown who herself lived a few more years after Frye’s death in ‘91 and was buried in Perth County with her first husband who predeceased her by two decades.  

Why would a practicing Christian, a United Church minister, opt for a cremation and a collective and indeterminate resting place? Wouldn’t Christians, even those of the Methodist variety, await the resurrection day and therefore commit the body whole to the earth? But perhaps that is simplifying the concept of resurrection. Only Frye–-who’s done his fair share of burying in his capacity of a minister–-would know why. He left no children, so they can’t be asked for an explanation.

There is so much good stuff in these excerpts from his notebooks. Here’s just one late in life thought, rife with all manner of ambivalence:

The fool hath said in his heart, there is no God [Psalm 53:1]. But every human being is a fool, and every human being has denied God in his heart. One may say other things later, but that is what one says first, & that is what one continues to hold to, as the central principle of existence, through life. One reason is that the first positive feeling in life is “I am,” which carries with it the sense “there is no other.” An embryonic consciousness of God may begin with the sense of the reality of other people; next comes the sense of the inevitability of death, where the feeling “I shall be not” suggests “something other is & will be.” For most people this other could only be nature; then comes the specifically vulnerable loss (often a parent, only Helen for me) suggesting “if she is not, what is?” Or, more related to myself: “if I am to be not, maybe I’ve got hold of the wrong I.” Anyway, “God is dead” is a silly bloody remark; “God never was” would at least be intelligible.

On our way back towards Yonge St, we stumbled across a proper landmark, the Massey Family monument. What a peculiar edifice: it’s as if a chapel and a turret produced a child. Looking very medieval, especially when you peek inside and see the marble slabs that look like drawers but are hiding individual graves, I expect. I was sure there would be an effigy or two inside, but none were to be seen through the ironwork on the locked double door. There were more modest individual Massey flat tombstones all around the chapel edifice, and it’s not clear who gets to be in and who out. My friend recognized the name of a deb whose Sweet Sixteen party he and his friends crashed (listen, I tend to have older friends, what of it). The place where the husband’s name usually goes was blank, though she has a double-barrel name. Another mystery. 

There is so much undiscovered in city’s historic cemeteries, and Prospect, St James and some others are on my to-visit-and-partly-map list too. And that Catholic cemetery that is kept under lock and key, SW corner of St Clair and Yonge. Apparently it used to be open until the area condoized up the wazoo and people started using the cemetery as a dog walking grounds (ie, dog toilet) and for other park-like activities. So the priests locked it. When you look through the railing, a sign greets you. “This is a sacred burial ground where the dead await the resurrection day.” Fair enough. That’s us told. 

You can see here how tightly boxed in by the development the cemetery found itself. There’s a tour announced for September 14, I’m marking my calendar.