Tales from the Crypt

Preserving Burial Customs for the Modern Day

By Lygia Navarro
Photography by Mitch Tobias

When Phil Freitas became operations manager at Oakland's Mountain View Cemetery in 1995, he dealt with an onslaught of puns.

"Are your customers just dying to see you?" wisecracking acquaintances asked. Others piped in with, "Is business dead?" More than a decade later, Freitas is accustomed to bad jokes and morbid curiosity. "I tell them, 'I hate to disappoint you, but I don't see dead bodies on a regular basis,'" the easygoing 53-yearold says with a wry smile.

What Freitas does deal with daily at the East Bay's largest cemetery--apart from managing construction contractors, 25 landscapers and a grave maintenance crew--are the intricacies of grieving families. Frietas has become a de facto expert on the burial traditions--which have ranged from animal sacrifices to graveyard feng shui--of the Bay Area's culturally diverse population. Wearing khakis and a long-sleeved blue dress shirt, Freitas, a trained horticulturist who sports a graying goatee, has the relaxed demeanor of a man at home in the outdoors and says the parklike quality of the cemetery attracted him to the job in the first place. These days, his two main accessories are a BlackBerry and a carved shell necklace he picked up in Malaysia.

Perched in the hills at the end of Piedmont Avenue, the cemetery is lush with rolling hills, oak and maple trees, peaceful winding pathways, majestic statues and plots going for between $3,500 and $9,000. (Graveyard plots are just like real estate, and a resting place with a San Francisco Bay view commands more than a lowland cemetery plot in Hayward or Richmond.) And the vista of the bay is breathtaking: One can see from the peaks of the Peninsula all the way to Richmond, with San Francisco, sailboats and shimmering water in between.

The 226-acre site--built in 1863 and run by a nonprofit organization--replaced the city's first graveyard, the Old Lake Merritt Cemetery, in downtown Oakland near Harrison and 20th Streets. That cemetery, while closer to central Oakland life, was not ideal. "Bodies kept washing up when the water table changed," says Oakland History Room librarian Steven Lavioe.

Mountain View's site was chosen for its higher ground, and landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead--the designer of New York's Central Park--drew up the plans.

Mountain View is home to 170,529 souls--some of the marble tombs are as big as houses, especially those with names like Ghiradelli, Crocker, Merritt and Kaiser-- but the cemetery is quickly running out of space. A new section is slated to open this year, and Freitas expects the area "will draw a lot of interest from the Chinese community."

With diverse groups of families seeking the cemetery's services, Freitas often serves as a cultural diplomat as well as Mountain View's key grounds manager. And, he says, at times it can be challenging to balance the burial expectations of families with the sometimes conflicting sensibilities of the public.

On a recent afternoon, workers carefully perched a backhoe over a plot, digging out dark, dense soil for a burial. Freitas has learned to be thoughtful about all aspects of work at Mountain View--even the equipment used around graves. An unintentional mishap--such as a cracked headstone--can cause extreme anxiety for family members, Freitas says. In fact, one serious feng shui practitioner--concerned over righting a relative's crooked headstone--asked Freitas to wait for an auspicious repair date. Some followers of feng shui have requested that their relatives' graves face certain directions or that their loved one's caskets be rotated minute amounts. "As they lower the casket in, [the families] say, 'Move it that way. Move it this way,' " Freitas says, motioning with his finger.

Traditional Buddhist ceremonies--which include monks, chanting, incense and paper replicas of houses and other items that the dead might need in the afterlife--are pretty tame, Freitas says. The cemetery has had few Muslim burials, but Freitas has worked to accommodate Islamic requirements, such as burying the dead facing Mecca. Every April, the cemetery swells with families celebrating Ching Ming, the Chinese grave-sweeping holiday. Families come to visit and worship ancestors and place intricate food offerings--meat, mooncakes and trios of oranges--on graves. Years ago, some Southeast Asian burial customs at Mountain View involved killing animals-- a practiced since banned and a decision some mourners protested. Strained feelings have evened out since, says Freitas.

Freitas often finds himself conscientiously explaining customs to mourners, some of whom are perplexed by the traditions because they do not understand their significance.

Beyond cultural differences, the solemnity of death affects everyone, even Freitas. When a man his same age died of a heart attack, Freitas found himself contemplating his own mortality: "I kept thinking he was too young." And at the burial of a Cal student killed in an accident, Freitas, a father of two, says he could barely speak when the young man's father came up to thank him afterward. Emotionally overwhelmed, Freitas could only zero in on the fact that the dead boy and his own son were the same age.

"I've gotten all these gray hairs in the past 10 years," he says.

On a hillside overlooking rows of headstones, Freitas watches workers open up another grave and tells stories of his Mountain View adventures. Though the job is serious, Freitas says maintaining a sense of humor helps him keep a healthy perspective.

He has seen a lot over the last decade at Mountain View--goth weddings in the chapel, movies filmed on the grounds, families asking to have their interred relatives' caskets moved across country--and has gained reverential respect for the individuality of each death.

Just as the families he works with have a clear notion of their loved ones' final preferences, Freitas has also given the idea some thought for himself. When his time comes, this graveyard guru wants to be quietly cremated.