In 2000 a unique archaeological
find in Andong City Korean captured the imagination of the Korean people.The archaeological site was a tomb with a
remarkably preserved mummy.At 5 foot 9 inches
he was tall for his people, especially in his day.His dark hair and dark mustache were still intact.Eung-Tae died in 1586, four hundred and twenty
seven years ago.
A well preserved mummy is a rare
find in Korea, but what was found with him is what has captivated the imagination
of the Korean people.Thirteen letters
and notes addressed to Eung-Tae were found with him in his tomb, all written by his
pregnant wife whose identity had been lost.
These poignant
notes remind us that the human heart is timeless.It knows no cultural, geographical or generational
bounds.The emotions that this young
wife pours from her heart into her eulogies remind us that our ancestors and the
people who lived in the past did so with real heart and real emotion.They were not simply characters in a history
book.
One note was found
on a paper bundle containing a pair of sandals woven from the grievingwidow's hair. She wrote: “with my hair I weave this” and
“before you were even able to wear it.”
Of all the notes
left to Eung-Tae, the one lovingly laid upon his chest is the one most remembered. The translation to English from archaic Korean
has diminished the poetry that was once in the lines, but the love and loss is still very clear.
To Won's Father
June 1, 1586
You always said, "Dear, let's live together until our hair turns gray and
die on the same day." How could you pass away without me? Who should I and
our little boy listen to and how should we live? How could you go ahead of me?
How did you bring your heart to me and how did I bring my heart to you?
Whenever we lay down together you always told me, "Dear, do other people
cherish and love each other like we do? Are they really like us?" How
could you leave all that behind and go ahead of me?
I just cannot live without you. I just want to go to you. Please take me to
where you are. My feelings toward you I cannot forget in this world and my
sorrow knows no limit. Where would I put my heart in now and how can I live
with the child missing you?
Please look at this letter and tell me in detail in my dreams. Because I want
to listen to your saying in detail in my dreams I write this letter and put it
in. Look closely and talk to me.
When I give birth to the child in me, who should it call father? Can anyone
fathom how I feel? There is no tragedy like this under the sky.
You are just in another place, and not in such a deep grief as I am. There is
no limit and end to my sorrows that I write roughly. Please look closely at
this letter and come to me in my dreams and show yourself in detail and tell
me. I believe I can see you in my dreams. Come to me secretly and show
yourself. There is no limit to what I want to say and I stop here.
This story is a bit of a departure from my usual
postings.Hart Island is not an
archaeological site and not a tourist destination. (Although it has the
potential to become both someday.)It is
a historic site on many levels, but it is not appreciated or interpreted as
such.I had never heard of Hart Island,
and evidently that is true even for most New Yorkers. "Mass Grave" may be an overstatement as each burial was in individual coffins. However, the graves are dug in "mass" fashion with long trenches to hold hundreds of bodies at a time. I find this story fascinating and re-blog it
in its entirety below.
What We Found at Hart Island, The Largest Mass Grave Site in the U.S.
By - Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan, November 7,
2013
It’s a place where few living New Yorkers have ever
set foot, but nearly a million dead ones reside: Hart Island, the United
States’ largest mass grave, which has been closed to the public for 35 years.
It is difficult to visit and off-limits to photographers. But that may be about
to change, as a debate roils over the city’s treatment of the unclaimed dead.
Never heard of Hart? You’re not alone—and that’s part of the problem.
Hart
Island is a thin, half-mile long blip of land at the yawning mouth of Long Island
Sound, just across the water from City Island in the Bronx. Depending on who
you ask, it was named either for its organ-like shape or for the deer (or hart)
that thrived here after trekking across the frozen sound in the 18th century.
Hart is dense with history; it’s been used as a prison for Confederate
soldiers, a workhouse for the poor, a women's asylum, and a Nike missile base
during the Cold War.
Its most important role has been
to serve as what’s known as a potter’s field, a common gravesite for the city’s
unknown dead. Some 900,000 New Yorkers (or adopted New Yorkers) are buried
here; hauntingly, the majority are interred by prisoners from Riker’s Island
who earn 50 cents an hour digging gravesites and stacking simple wooden boxes
in groups of 150 adults and 1,000 infants. These inmates—most of them very
young, serving out short sentences—are responsible for building the only
memorials on Hart Island: Handmade crosses made of twigs and small offerings of
fruit and candy left behind when a grave is finished.
There are a few ways to end up on Hart Island. One
third of its inhabitants are infants—some parents couldn’t afford a burial,
others didn’t realize what a “city burial” meant when they checked it on the
form. Many of the dead here were homeless, while others were simply unclaimed;
if your body remains at the city morgue for more than two weeks, you, too, will
be sent for burial by a team of prisoners on Hart Island. These practices have
given rise to dozens of cases where parents and families aren’t notified in
time to claim the body of their loved one. It can take months (even years) to
determine whether your missing mom, dad, sibling, or child ended up at Hart.
Even
if you do learn that a friend or loved one is buried at Hart, you won’t be able
to find out exactly where. Though Hart Island is the largest publicly funded
cemetery in the world, it’s been closed to the public since 1976, when the
Department of Corrections took control of the site. Family members can request
a visit on the last Thursday of every month, but they aren’t allowed to visit
specific graves—in fact, there’s no official map (not to mention burial
markers) of the mass graves on Hart. The Hart Island
Project, a nonprofit organization led by an artist named Melinda Hunt, is spearheading the fight to
change that: Hunt has worked for decades to convince the city to transfer
control of the island from the DOC to the Parks Department, making it into a
public cemetery in name, as well as in function.
Hunt got involved with Hart during the 1980s, when
the AIDS epidemic put the island into the public spotlight for the first time (the
first New York child to die of the virus is buried here in the only individual
grave on the island). Her book about the island was published in 1998, and
represents the last time an artist was allowed to work on-site. Since then,
Hunt has single-handedly acted as the sole legal and political advocate for
families of the deceased buried here, and in the process, become the foremost
historian and keeper of knowledge about the island.
Image copyright Joel Sternfeld and Melinda Hunt. From their 1998 book, Hart Island.
Part
of her self-assigned job is to liaise with family members searching for
information about their loved ones—like Elaine Joseph, a lifetime New Yorker
and veteran who now serves as Secretary of the Hart Island Project. It’s taken
Joseph more than 30 years to find out that her child was buried on the
island—not an unusual scenario, it turns out, though no less heartbreaking.
It’s women like Joseph, who have come forward to tell their stories, who are
helping Hunt to raise awareness of the gross mishandling of Hart Island.
On
a dreary, lukewarm morning last month, Gizmodo—myself and co-worker Leslie
Horn—along with two other reporters, met Hunt and Joseph in the quaint town of
City Island. They had graciously offered to include us on a tour of the island,
and we were about to become some of the first members of the press to visit
since the 1980s.
Because inmates perform weekly burials on Hart
Island, the DOC treats outside visitors with a certain amount of caution. The
two polite employees we met on the rundown dock at City Island asked first for
our IDs, then for any electronics we had, storing our phones, tablets, and
laptops in manila folders inside a DOC trailer on the dock, where we also used
the restroom (there are none on the island). Inside the stall, someone had
taped up a picture of a manatee—a reference to this meme—with the following
mantra: Everything will be OK.
After
everyone was ready, we boarded a small ferry and chugged off into the fog. To
overly-dramatic loons like me, stepping aboard felt like crossing the River
Styx or sailing out to Arnold Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead—except, in
this scenario, the gatekeepers were clad in NYC corrections uniforms. As Joseph
recounted her story, and our ferry slogged across the channel, it became clear
that, for the loved ones of people buried here, the fight for Hart Island isn’t
about entering an underworld—it’s about seeking the right to mend ties with the
living. 35 years ago, Joseph gave birth to a baby girl who
needed surgery a few days later. The operation took place at Mount Sinai
Hospital during the Great Blizzard of 1978, which shut down the city’s roads
and phone lines for days. When a recovering Joseph got through to the hospital,
she learned that her baby had died during surgery. Eventually, she was
connected with the understaffed city morgue—which informed her that her child
had already been buried with other infants. When the death certificate finally
arrived, no cemetery was listed.
In
city parlance, a blank spot next to the cemetery means one thing: A Hart Island
burial. But, in a time before the internet, that fact was lost on anyone
without inside knowledge—and Joseph spent the next decade trying to find out
where her daughter was buried, visiting the Medical Examiner’s office and
digging through the municipal archives. It was as if her child had never been
born. “It came to a standstill,” she says, speaking over the phone later. “Over
the years, I went on with life.” But every so often, she’d try again—fruitlessly
searching the city’s archives for a trace.
It
was only in 2008, 31 years after she gave birth, that Joseph’s first lead
emerged—thanks to the internet. A Google search for “potter’s field” returned a
mention of Hart Island, and then, the Hart Island project—headed up by one
Melinda Hunt. She sent her an email. A few months later, after a Freedom of
Information request granted them access to burial records, the duo made a
heartbreaking discovery: Two volumes of infant burial records, spanning 1977 to
1981, were missing. The lead had gone cold.
Grave of first child to die of AIDS in NYC, with burial documents. Photo by Melinda Hunt via The Hart Island Project
What’s
perhaps even more painful about city burials is that the relatives whose loved
ones are buried on the island—thousands of the living—can’t freely visit it.
Instead, they must request a visit formally from the Department of Corrections,
which will usually grant the right to visit a small gazebo near the dock,
rather than any of the actual burial sites. Our tour was Joseph’s second time
on the island, and she visibly fumed about being forced to sign into a DOC
visitor’s book as we disembarked.
It’s
a grim scene: A trash-covered shoreline gives way to scrubby brown grass and a
gravel driveway, where two rusting vans are parked beside a handful of officers
waiting to check our IDs. The only sign of the island’s purpose are several
tiny white angel statues that line the rotting pathway around a nondescript
garage building. The cherubs seem like new additions, judging by the tags still
visible on their behinds.
The two DOC guides flanked our
small group closely on either side, guiding us along the shore. Our “tour” of
the island was, in a sense, over even before it began: The final destination is
less than 20 yards from the dock, where a small wooden gazebo—someone in the
group calls it a “chicken coop”—gives shelter to mourners who visit the island.
The DOC’s regulations prevent us from walking further into the patchy grass
that covers the island, so we sit down on the benches inside the hut. A
few feet away, a small gravestone represents the only sign of a burial memorial.
The stone was paid for by the family of the island’s long-time backhoe operator
when he passed away. Behind it, a Victorian-era administrative building, likely
left over from the island’s one-time psychiatric hospital, lies in ruins. Any
real grave markers that remained were removed years ago by the DOC; today, Hart
looks like a dreary but nondescript spit of land you might find anywhere else
along the mid-Atlantic.
An open burial pit next to the wards in the west of the island. Source: Kingston Lounge
Hunt
and Joseph pull out a pen-marked map (pieced together by Hunt using satellite imagery)
and try to locate the general direction of where her daughter—along with many
other misplaced infants from the same year—might lie. It’s woefully inadequate,
not to mention unnecessary given the advent of GPS. Even if the DOC doesn’t
create markers for each gravesite, they could certainly make the information
available online. But Hart—right down to its decaying Victorian buildings—is
stuck in the past. As Hunt explains, much of the way Hart operates dates from
the Civil War. “This is a very 19th century kind of place,” she adds.
But it doesn’t have to be. Hunt,
who qualifies as nothing short of a hero, is working to extract answers to
painful questions—not only at the personal level, but at a legal one. Do loved
ones have a legal right to visit a family gravesite? In some states—mostly in
the South, where Civil War graves often lie on private land—yes. But, in New
York, things are more ambiguous: State public health laws codify the common law
right to a decent burial, but it is unclear whether that includes the right to
visitation. In 2012, a New York Ob/Gyn named Dr. Laurie Grant, whose stillborn
daughter was buried on Hart Island without her consent in 1993, brought a lawsuit
in New York State Court seeking an injunction against the DOC that would allow
her to visit the gravesite.
Thanks
to years of testimony by Hunt, things are slowly changing on the city side of
things: In April, the DOC set up an online database of burial records. And in
September, Hunt tweeted that the DOC would grant access to GPS information,
too. Just this week, a request to visit grave sites made by Joseph and seven
other women received a response that promised their petition is being
considered.
After all, the Department of
Corrections isn’t to blame, since it’s their job to run prisons—and
they do this well—but prison guards simply aren’t a good match for running a
massive cemetery. The next big push will be a bill first introduced last year,
which would mandate the Department of Parks to assume control of the island. A
big part of getting the bill off the ground—and mothers like Grant and Joseph
to their children's graves—is rousing public awareness and support. In many
cases, New Yorkers just haven't heard about what's going on at Hart.
What’s
most curious about the situation, in some ways, isn’t whether the city will
eventually open up Hart Island to the public—that seems all but inevitable—but
what will happen to the island afterward. Hunt’s hope, which she described in a
New York Times op-ed last month, is that the island will become the
city’s next public park and memorial to the city’s past inhabitants. “I like to
think of Hart Island as New York City’s family tomb,” she wrote. “We don’t
always get along, but we do live and die and are buried close to one another.”
Joseph, for her part, would just be happy with grave markers. “I have nothing
to lose by continuing to fight for these rights,” she added as we left the
island last month. Today, she’s hoping that Bill de Blasio’s election as mayor
will speed up the process.
One of the mass graves that fit up to 150 adult coffins. Source: Kingston Lounge
The
big question, of course, is why? Why hasn’t the city taken over control of the
island? Why hasn’t anyone attempted to make it easier for families to visit?
Where is the harm or danger in letting people mourn near where their loved ones
lie? Tragically, the answer is similar to the reason people end up at Hart Island
in the first place: A mixed bag of budgetary issues and pure practicality,
wrapped up in a painful and banal truth. In a city of eight million, some
things—whether people or whole islands—slip by unnoticed.
