Eau Claire’s two city cemeteries – Forest Hill and Lakeview – have made more local news in the past month than they’ve made in the past decade. As V1 mentioned last issue (WEAU and the Leader-Telegram ran stories, too), the Parks, Rec, and Forestry Department quit supplying all but one water tap at each cemetery. What eats at folks about this?

People have been burying people a long time. King Tut, for example, quite the rock star in the 1970s, actually died and was buried some time before. (In those ways he’s like Keith Richards.) The Valley of the Kings, his rest, is coolest cemetery ever – the pyramids at Giza, 300 miles away, are the coolest tombstones.

But, as grave fields, those sites are spanking new. Among homo sapiens, ceremonial burial dates back at least 130,000 years. (You’d have to add 6,000 “greats” in front of your “grandma.”) Of course almost all ancient things are buried – hence archaeology – but at least after that point, the bodies we find weren’t buried by time, but by friends and family.

Our husky, lowbrow cousins the Neanderthal buried their dead even earlier. Scholars debate whether they put any symbolic meaning into it. I think they did. Neanderthal Shanidar IV (probably not the name his parents gave him), an old man (maybe even 40! Dude!), was buried with yarrow, cornflower, bachelor’s button, thistle, ragwort, grape hyacinth, woody horsetail, and hollyhock: shaman’s medicines. Archaeologists have found other Neanderthals buried with bison bones, tools, and ochre.

Fast-forward 129,000 years and head northwest to Europe. In the middle Middle Ages, burials took place on consecrated church grounds. Rituals varied tremendously, but in continental Europe, folks were often buried in mass graves until their bodies decomposed. The bones were then exhumed and stored either in the bounding walls of the cemetery or inside the church. Only the richest or most famous had crypts in the church or churchyard adorned with name and dates.

Fast-forward another thousand years and set sail for America. Between 1800 and 1835, we suffered a dozen epidemics: smallpox, yellow and dengue fever, malaria, influenza, and at least five outbreaks of cholera. Some old wisdom reoccurred to us: bury folks away from the city (as at Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives).

Coincidentally, the English Romantic Movement was trendy, with its appreciation of “nature,” by which they meant walking in gardens, not heading for Donner Pass in winter. Major American cities built public “garden cemeteries.” We followed suit later. Although we’ve now surrounded them, Forest Hill and Lakeview were originally platted well on the outskirts. As cultured gardens where loved ones slept, cemeteries became weekend leisure destinations.

Also coincidentally, lawn care took a big step forward. People had already been scything weeds and grass around house and barn – kept the vermin away. Around 1830, engineer Edward Budding (a name almost as appropriate to lawn care as Thomas Crapper’s to the toilet) made the task easier. He invented the reel mower, which looked and ran like today’s reel mower ($89 at target.com). Indiana’s Elwood McGuire made a lighter model, and by 1885, America was manufacturing 50,000 a year.

So in the grand scheme, our well-kept lawns and garden cemeteries are modern inventions. But caring for the dead – whether wrapping the body in fine linen or burying it with ochre – is as old as humans, or even older, depending on what you mean by humans.

All this begs a couple of questions. The answers may seem obvious, and the questions may seem horrible to ask at all, but let’s ask them anyway: Why do people care about cemeteries? Why do we care about the dead?

The dead don’t care. They don’t remember the promises I’ve made to them or what it says in their wills. They aren’t critical of the undertaker or sexton or government. Their caskets and plots, the beauty and upkeep of their grounds: these mean nothing to them.

Back in the day, we sent them prepared for the journey. Made them look good and packed their tombs with food, medicine, tools, and currency. We still pay that a little service, but we don’t believe it anymore.

Life is for the living. Although we say that cemeteries are for the dead, they are, in fact, for us. That’s the way it should be. Although the dead don’t remember us, we remember them. And because we love them, we want others to know their stories, so we mark those stories briefly: “Mother,” “PFC Korea.” Many times, we’ve also personally cared about them, and for them, for years. We will not stop and so we water flowers. Love is a book so great that we want to keep reading even after it’s done.

More selfishly, we can look forward. When we’re dead, we won’t care either. But right now we care. Right now, we hope someone will remember us – that someone will put, and care for, pretty flowers on our graves.