Where Are They Buried? (47 page)

Margaret formed the American Birth Control League, forerunner of the Planned Parenthood Federation, a national lobbying group that spearheaded action on the legislative front and served as a clearinghouse for information on birth-control research, education, and services. The league slowly chipped away at various legislative restrictions, and in 1936 the Comstock law crumbled. Margaret expanded the scope of her movement worldwide and presided at conferences on birth and population control and, by the 1940s, the birth-control movement had been accepted by the medical profession and increasing numbers of the American public.

After four years in a Tucson nursing home, Margaret died of congestive heart failure at 86. Shortly before her death, she said that she hoped to be remembered for helping women because women take care of culture and tradition, they preserve what is good, and they are the strength of the future.

Margaret was buried at Fishkill Rural Cemetery in Fishkill, New York.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
Take Exit 13 from I-84, follow Route 9 north for a mile, and the cemetery is on the left.

GRAVE DIRECTIONS:
Enter the cemetery, go past the office, and stay on the paved drive after the bridge. Turn right between Sections G and R, turn right again at the “T” in the road, then stop after 30 feet. A dozen yards to the left is the Slee plot, belonging to her husband’s family, and there Margaret is buried.

FEBRUARY 3, 1874 – JULY 29, 1946

APRIL 30, 1877 – MARCH 7, 1967

After her formative years in San Francisco, Gertrude Stein became disillusioned while studying psychology at Johns Hopkins University and, in 1903, moved to Paris, where she would stay for the rest of her life. There, Gertrude soon established herself as a leading patron of avant-garde art and opened a salon with her brother Leo, who was himself an art critic and painter. As a result of Gertrude’s notoriously sharp wit and formidable literary and artistic judgment, the salon became a gathering place for developing artists and writers including Henri Matisse, Ezra Pound, Pablo Picasso, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway. It was Gertrude who coined the phrase, adopted by Hemingway, “the lost generation,” to describe the expatriate writers living abroad between the wars.

In 1907 Gertrude met Alice B. Toklas. In addition to their many mutual interests, they shared a strong personal attraction, and they eventually settled into life as partners. Gertrude wrote while Alice juggled all the domestic chores, proofreading and typing Gertrude’s manuscripts besides. Since Gertrude fulfilled herself while Alice took care of her, some scholars have since criticized their relationship as mimicking the worst heterosexual marriage. Still, both women expressed contentment in their roles and were devoted to each other.

Never one to underplay her intellectual ability, the strong-willed Gertrude referred to herself as “the creative literary mind of the century,” but her writing style, which mirrored the fragmented and abstract Cubist art style, was not commercially well-received. Her first two books,
Three Lives
and
Tender Buttons
, found favor with only a small, discerning audience and, during this time, Gertrude and Alice lived almost solely off their modest inheritances. Later came the more influential works
The Making of Americans
and
How to Write
and, finally, in 1933, Gertrude came to real prominence for
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
. (The work is actually a biography of Gertrude, written by Gertrude, told from Alice’s perspective.) Further confusing the matter was the popular film
I Love You, Alice B. Toklas
, which was released in 1968 and had absolutely nothing to do with the book, Gertrude, or Alice.

After surviving Germany’s occupation of France with the help of a Nazi collaborator, Gertrude contracted cancer as World War II wound down. Before undergoing surgery, she turned to a worried Alice and asked, “What is the answer?” Alice was silent and Gertrude continued, “In that case, what is the question?” These were among her last words; she died during the surgery at 72.

Alice lived another 21 years and tried her own hand at writing, contributing articles on cooking to magazines and compiling her memoirs in
What Is Remembered
. A reviewer called her “a woman who all her life has looked in a mirror and seen someone else.”

When Alice died at 89, she was buried with Gertrude in a joint plot at the Père-Lachaise Cemetery in Paris.

AUGUST 26, 1910 – SEPTEMBER 5, 1997

In 1928 Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu, Mother Teresa, arrived in India by way of Ireland and Turkey, and for twenty years taught at a relatively wealthy Christian girls’ school in India. After a spiritual second calling, the Vatican granted her permission to begin a new kind of work, and in 1950 her Missions of Charity order, where the most abjectly poor and terminally ill would be served, received official status.

Mother Teresa needed immediately to secure a place where she could care for these desperate people and, remarkably, the first location offered to her for this Christian work was an empty “dormashalah”—a place on the grounds of a sacred Hindu Kali Temple where pilgrims rested after their holy journeys. There, the sisters rallied against the squalor and worked to fill the last days of the loneliest destitute with dignity. Their order’s distinguishing garment—a simple white sari with sapphire blue bands—soon became a familiar identifier of the caretakers of Calcutta’s most impoverished.

In 1953 Mother Teresa’s first orphanage opened and four years later her mission began working with lepers. In 1959 the order expanded outside of Calcutta and today there are more than 500 Missions of Charity worldwide, all dedicated to service of the most indigent.

By popular consensus and in the wake of her 1979 Nobel Peace Prize, Mother Teresa was lionized by the public but nonetheless
continued to strike an apolitical pose, refusing to take a stand on anything other than strictly religious matters. Never a social critic, she did not attack the economic or political structures of the cultures that were producing the people she served. Her role was only to provide constant love.

At 87, Mother Teresa left her physical body and was buried in the back courtyard of the Mother House of the Sisters of the Missionaries of Charity in Calcutta, India, on the street of Acharya Jagadish Chandra Bose.

In normal circumstances the canonization of a potential saint does not begin until five years after his or her death. But Pope John Paul II, who has declared more saints than his predecessors in the last four centuries combined, signaled his great affection for Mother Teresa by allowing work to begin on the beatification of the diminutive missionary just two years after death.

In December 2002 he formally recognized a miracle attributed to her, and she is now set to be deemed a saint once a second miracle is credited. As of July, 2014, we’re still waiting…

FEBRUARY 20, 1902 – APRIL 22, 1984

The man responsible for the most majestic black-and-white landscapes of the American West liked to credit his photographs to luck, saying, “I get to places just as God is ready to have someone click the shutter.” In reality, each of Ansel Adams’ finished prints was the result of a painstaking effort to achieve an artistic result.

In 1916 Ansel’s family vacationed in Yosemite and, from that visit until his death, he maintained a love affair with the land and became an advocate for its conservation. The visit also marked the beginning of his involvement with photography. Armed with his father’s Kodak Brownie box camera and with one of the country’s most beautiful landscapes before him, young Ansel began taking photographs, and he simply never stopped.

Though he worked as a concert pianist during his twenties, Ansel’s photography hobby eventually overwhelmed his musical aspirations and he began to articulate his ideas about photography as an art form. In 1927, with
Monolith, the Face of Half Dome
, Ansel first developed his unique photographic style, using a red filter to dramatically darken the sky while leaving the famous granite formation in clear and sharp focus. He opened a studio in San Francisco, gave an exhibition in New York, and, by the time of World War II, was training the military’s photographer historians.

Over the next decades Ansel produced most of the finest examples of the country’s glorious and epic vistas. He received fellowships to record the national parks, was director of the Sierra Club for 37 years, and, by the 1970s, his prints accounted for half of the total dollar value of commercial photographic art sales in the United States. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor, and the humble visionary graced the cover of magazines. Indeed, Ansel always stressed the importance of vision, as distinct from gadgetry. “A picture,” he said, “is only a collection of brightnesses and there is nothing worse than a brilliant image of a fuzzy concept.”

Ansel died of heart disease at 82. In a fitting tribute, Congress passed legislation designating more than 200,000 acres near Yosemite National Park as the Ansel Adams Wilderness Area. Later, his ashes were scattered on Mount Ansel Adams, an 11,760-foot mountain within the wilderness area that was named in his honor.

MARCH 11, 1952 – MAY 11, 2001

During a hitchhiking trip around Europe, British teenager Douglas Adams was lying in a field, a little bit drunk, thumbing a copy of
A Hitchhiker’s Guide to Europe
, when it occurred to him that somebody should write a similar guide to the galaxy. As it happened, that “somebody” was Doug himself, and in 1979
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
was published, though its life began the previous year as a BBC radio series.

The cult science-fiction comedy is a picaresque account of mild-mannered suburbanite Arthur Dent’s travels through space with his friend Ford Prefect after the Earth is destroyed to make way for an intergalactic highway. The book blends Doug’s witty philosophy with memorably named characters like Zaphod Beeblebrox and Marvin the Paranoid Android, and is a repository for all knowledge, including the answer to “the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything” which, as it turns out, is 42.

Spawning best-selling sequels including
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
and
So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish
, as well as hit television and stage shows, the
Guide
became a huge success, and one for which Doug always claimed he was quite unprepared. “It was like being helicoptered to the top of Mount Everest,” he said, “or having an orgasm without the foreplay.”

Doug died of a heart attack at 49. He was cremated and his ashes were buried at London’s East Highgate Cemetery.

CEMETERY DIRECTIONS:
Take the Underground Tube to Archway Station and then walk up Highgate Hill to Waterlow Park. Exit the Park onto Swain’s Lane and you’ll see the cemetery gate in front of you.