There are over 26,000 people buried in Hillside Cemetery. Like most people I imagine, I find something mysterious about cemeteries. All those people resting there silently. Part of what makes cemeteries mysterious is the unknown. Who are these people? Were they good people? How did they die?
The Flaming Lips sing about death and the loss of friends and family. Wayne Coyne croons, “Do you realize that everyone you know someday will die?” But when everyone that knows you has passed who is there to remember and tell your stories?
Well, for starters there is Lorine Marshall. Lorine has created a tour of Hillside Cemetery told through the lives of six Hatters long since passed. The tour can be attended over the next two Sundays (September 13 and 20) at 2 pm. (For more information you can reach Lorine at 403.527.2774) I was treated to a sneak preview recently and I’d highly recommend it. Thanks to the sponsorship of Cook Southland Funeral Chapel and Medicine Hat Monumental Company, who funded the research for this project, there is no charge for this event.
The tour is a fascinating glimpse into a handful of lives that lie buried in Hillside Cemetery. Moving through six grave sites Lorine brings back to life a group of disparate Medicine Hat residents that were born between the 1880s and 1900s. Some died valiantly in a foreign land, some close to home. Some died old, some died young. Some names are familiar to us, some have been forgotten.
Lorine Marshall is the perfect host for this tour. Born and raised here, Lorine has spent her life in Medicine Hat. She is intimately connected with the people, their stories and she’s a relentless researcher. I first met Lorine through her work with the Historical Society. In the age of Google historical research remains stubbornly resistant to easy searches. Many documents have not been digitized. Most archives must be searched one at a time and Lorine’s name is known in local archives from Regina to Calgary.
This tour, distilled into one hour, took months of research. All this work has unearthed long forgotten stories. There is the story of the young man who died while trying to save a drowning girl in Elkwater and there is the story of one of the first nurses in Medicine Hat. There is the story of the carpenter without tools who ended up building large swaths of Medicine Hat and the story of a woman who travelled west from Ontario in a covered wagon.
Death is a part of life. We will all die. How we reconcile ourselves to this fact is one of the major tasks of our lives. But death also connects us to the people who came before us. It connects us to the large arc of history.
A funny thing happened after the tour. The cemetery felt less mysterious because now I knew some of the people there, of the good deeds they did and the good lives they lived. I hope this tour encourages more people to spend time in Hillside Cemetery. It’s a beautiful park. The Parks department rates Hillside as AAA. That means this cemetery gets the highest level of care and attention. And it’s well worth a visit.
Medicine Hat News. September 12, 2015.