Cemeteries

Even before the morning dew dried on the knolls of Rose Hills Memorial Park and Mortuary in Whittier on Saturday, hundreds of Chinese families were lined up outside the gate, their cars packed with bountiful offerings: fruit, noodle and vegetable dishes, whole roasted pigs. The long procession of cars -- 15,000 to 20,000 are expected through this afternoon -- meandered up the steep pathways to the west side of the cemetery, where many of Southern California's Chinese are buried.

The hundreds of brittle bones were buried in a forgotten cemetery with intricate ceramics, jade jewelry and opium pipes. They were the last earthly possessions of what could be dozens of Chinese workers too poor to have been buried back in China and too little-known to merit headstones. Some more than a century old, they offer an irresistible window into a dark chapter in Los Angeles' history.

On a stretch of land here dusted with the wings of sycamore seeds, love stories lie underground with the dead. There is the human heart buried next to the man who first captured it. The body of a banker whose wife left him for a famous actor. The couple hit by a train after a wedding reception. Time threatened to wash away the long-lost tales of romance and heartache trapped in Laurel Hill Cemetery, a Victorian-style graveyard overlooking the Schuylkill River.

The politics of burying and respecting the dead was at the heart of Saturday's traditional Ch'ing Ming festival, an annual Chinese event at which families visit their loved one's burial place. Mounted by the Chinese Historical Society, the festival at the historic Chinese shrine in Boyle Heights' Evergreen Cemetery is meant to honor those buried there nearly a century ago.

When Maira Martinez graduated from college in Bogota, she had dreams of being a female Indiana Jones, excavating ancient burial sites and unlocking secrets to Colombia's rich pre-Hispanic past. These days, she's sifting through a much more recent, and grisly, past. The 27-year-old forensic anthropologist is a member of one of 12 exhumation teams working to recover and, they hope, identify the remains of thousands of victims of Colombia's civil war.

On Veterans Day, Americans are asked to do something for the country besides voting and paying taxes: We are enjoined to think of those who fought in faraway places -- the Philippines, North Africa, Europe, Vietnam and Iraq. Most of them came home, but some did not, even in death. The remains of more than 120,000 war dead rest in American military cemeteries abroad, beneath rows of white marble crosses and Stars of David.

Gail Teach skipped Thanksgiving with her daughter in Texas so she wouldn't miss her mother's birthday. She never missed her mother's birthday, not in life or in death. On Nov. 26, she headed to Riverside National Cemetery, as she does every year, to sit beside her parents' grave and quietly grieve. She brought a stuffed reindeer for her mom -- who would have been 81 -- and a small pumpkin and an American flag for her dad, a veteran. But when she reached the spot, something wasn't right.

A graveyard vineyard in this East Bay city could yield some wholly delightful results for Catholic cemetery officials who are growing vines on surplus land in hopes of making sacramental wine. Zinfandel and cemeteries might seem an unlikely pairing, but there's an ancient link between wine and the church -- for example, the water-into-wine miracle of the wedding at Cana and the Last Supper, says Robert Seelig, director of funeral and cemetery services for the Roman Catholic Diocese of Oakland.

I PARKED my car on the salt-and-pepper asphalt and crossed the grassy expanse, weaving around headstones. Clutching flowers and lyrics from a U2 song, I looked for the grave of my sister, Michelle Melissa Becerra. She was a 22-year-old art history major at UCLA, just months from graduation. She was 10 years younger than I, the baby among my five brothers and sisters. Michelle and I rarely interacted and I never really understood why.

ATOP a hill in the sprawling Donghe Cemetery, on a spot said to have good feng shui, sits a 10,000-square-foot semicircular tomb adorned with a pagoda, stone dragons and a massive upended boulder. Cemetery workers say the plot, bought by a karaoke parlor owner, cost about $110,000. "He's only 40 years old, but he bought a five-generation tomb," said Li Daxi, who has worked at the cemetery in Inner Mongolia for six years. "Now that's thinking ahead."