Lone Mountain
Artist Statement
My essay, “Lone Mountain,” is borne out of my deep research into the history of San Francisco’s burials and the thousands of (mostly low-income and immigrant) graves that were left behind in the mass relocation to Colma.It’s a story about my efforts to help reunite a family beyond the grave.
It encourages readers to be more thoughtful and vigilant in how we engage with our communities — not just the living ones. It also goes beyond the binary idea that once community members are dead and forgotten, we don’t owe them anything anymore.
I was walking along a stone path through the gardens on Lone Mountain when I began to feel someone following me.
This hilly peak, home to the University of San Francisco, is a peaceful spot planted with tall cypress trees, native grasses, cheerful black-eyed Susans and pungent, domed lavender bushes. But it was once surrounded by acres and acres of graveyards. San Francisco’s settlers, including Catholics, Freemasons and senators were buried here by the tens of thousands. Standing near Lone Mountain’s peak I could almost picture the rows and rows of headstones, obelisks and angel statues that once stood watch here.
I’d been researching and visiting San Francisco’s former cemeteries for months, to write a book, after discovering that thousands of unmarked graves remain beneath the city’s parks, museums and neighborhoods. My heart aches to think of all those people forgotten, their lives erased, people walking over their graves day after day. But this was the first time I felt like one of the city’s dead was trying to communicate with me. There was a pressure at my back, like someone was approaching me from behind. I turned around; I didn’t see anyone behind me. Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling.
After several minutes, I stopped walking and settled on a carved stone bench, cold beneath me despite the bright January sun, and felt someone sit down next to me.
“Who are you?” I asked silently.
“My name’s Jerry.” I heard his voice in my head.
Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been able to sense, and occasionally talk with, spirits of the dead. It doesn’t happen often, unless I really tune into the spaces I’m in, and these conversations take place entirely inside my mind. I can picture the being I’m talking to and hear their voice, but I’m not seeing with my eyes or hearing with my ears. Not usually, anyway.
Sitting on the bench, I got an image of a young man in trousers, a waistcoat and a short jacket; a Victorian-era working class suit.
“I’m trying to find my wife and kid,” he said. He sounded weary, his gentle voice cracked by sadness. I wondered if he’d been here a long time, waiting for someone who could hear him; the cemeteries closed to burials more than 120 years ago. Tears stung my eyes as I imagined him wandering, lost, looking for his family.
One of my friends helps lost spirits of the dead find their way to the afterlife, and has taught me a little about what to say and do when one of them asks for help. “I’m not sure if you know this, but you’re dead — and they are, too,” I told him, again in my mind. “Look for a door or a light or a stairway. They’re likely in the afterlife, waiting for you. I hope you find it, and them.”
He nodded, but stayed on the bench as I stood to leave. I felt him watching as I headed to my car.
“I need to go,” I said, hoping I’d done enough. “Please don’t follow me home.” As I left, I pictured a sharp wind clearing his energy from mine. But it didn’t quite work.
The next day, as I walked through the room where I do most of my writing, I caught the strong scent of lavender, same as the silvery shrubs we’d sat by on Lone Mountain. It lingered for days. I told Jerry, again and again, to leave. Finally, the scent disappeared.
I didn’t realize it yet, but Jerry wasn’t finished with me.
* * *
Almost two years after my conversation with Jerry, and about two months after my book came out, I received an email about a headstone that once stood in San Francisco’s Calvary Cemetery, on the slopes of Lone Mountain.
The sender, Vera Kochan, was with the Moraga Historical Society, which has had this gravestone in its archive for decades. She read an article about my book and thought I might be able to help her find where the stone’s owner was buried now.
My heart beat faster and my hands tingled with excitement. A research challenge! I love digging into historical records, each detail adding shade and color to someone’s life story. It feels almost like time travel; imagining their birth, the streets they walked, their descendants, their final days. Those details are lost when someone’s grave is unmarked, and nobody deserves to be forgotten after death.
The small, simple gray headstone belonged to Elisa J. Berry. It said she was born in Detroit and died in San Francisco on July 31, 1876, at age 28. I ran a quick search on Find a Grave, a vast online database of burial sites, and learned that Elisa’s grave was moved — along with tens of thousands of others — from Calvary Cemetery in San Francisco to Holy Cross Cemetery in Colma. I wrote back to Vera and told her where Elisa’s buried now.
She sent back an article written by another Moraga Historical Society member, who had uncovered much more detail about Elisa’s history. I opened it immediately, eager to learn more about Elisa.
Records suggest her name was actually Eliza; the stonemasons may have spelled it wrong when carving her grave marker. Her maiden name is lost to history, as is her wedding date, but she married John J. Berry, a fellow Michiganer, and came to San Francisco sometime in the 1870s. Their son, Franklin Jerome, was born in July 1876; Eliza died from complications of birthing him.
Eliza’s death was the first of many horrors for the Berry family. Franklin Jerome died just three weeks later, on August 21, 1876, of malnutrition, and was buried alongside his mother in Calvary Cemetery. It’s hard to know for sure, but it’s likely that John didn’t know how to care for him, or was so devastated by Eliza’s death that he couldn’t function.
On November 7, overcome with grief, John visited their gravesite and took his own life. He held a Catholic prayer book in his hands, and he’d written on the flyleaf, “It is with me insanity or death, and in my weak Judgment I prefer the latter. God help my baby and forgive me.” John was not buried in Calvary — likely because of Catholic views on suicide — but instead in nearby Odd Fellows Cemetery, also on Lone Mountain.
Reading through this information, I thought back to my encounter two years earlier. This man’s name was John J. Berry. J. Berry. Could that be what came through as “Jerry?” I shivered. Somehow, I knew it was. It had to be.
John was born in 1841 in Buffalo, New York, and worked as a bookkeeper before serving in the Union Army during the Civil War. He was already in California by then; he enlisted in San Francisco. He was 35 when he took his life.
No wonder he felt so lost, I thought as I turned the story over and over in my mind. He must have thought he would be with Eliza and Franklin Jerome again once he quit the mortal world. But something kept him stuck on the mountain, even after their graves were moved. He’d asked me for help finding his wife and child; now, his wife was asking me to help, in her own way.
Settlers buried in San Francisco in the decades after the Gold Rush, like John and Eliza, didn’t get to rest in eternal peace like they’d probably expected. In the early 20th Century, city officials banned burials within the city limits, and ordered cemeteries to move their dead elsewhere, largely to make room for more housing.
While most of John’s Odd Fellows Cemetery brethren were relocated to a plot in Colma, his remains now rest in the San Francisco National Cemetery, thanks to his Civil War service. His white marble headstone memorializes him as a member of Company K in the first regiment of the California infantry.
Eliza’s grave was relocated to Holy Cross on June 27, 1940, and Holy Cross officials say little Franklin Jerome’s body was reburied with her. Nobody knows for sure why Eliza’s headstone didn’t go to Holy Cross, too. While human remains and effects were typically moved to new cemeteries in Colma, headstones often weren’t, unless a surviving family member had the money to pay for it. Those that weren’t moved were repurposed: Lone Mountain’s grave markers now line the drainage channels in Buena Vista Park. They make up the breakwater at Aquatic Park. They shift beneath the sands — and visitors’ feet — at Ocean Beach.
Eliza’s stone, along with untold numbers of others, became foundation materials in Moraga’s short-lived Valle Vista subdivision, established in 1914, where about 60 families moved in. In 1922, the East Bay Water Company began buying up lots to create the Upper San Leandro Reservoir, and by 1944 the last property was sold. Eliza’s memorial was discovered and the Moraga Historical Society agreed to store it. It’s been with them ever since.
Vera wanted to reunite Eliza’s headstone with her burial site. Without a stone, her grave is anonymous. There’s probably nobody left in the San Francisco area who can claim Eliza as an ancestor, but every gravestone in a cemetery tells a story. Passersby can read it, reflect on her Detroit origins and her brief life, and imagine more about who she was. Some might even grieve her, or at least keep her from being forgotten.
I agreed to help. Maybe then John could find Eliza. Maybe then she could be remembered, and their small family could find peace.
***
The sky was cold and steely, heaving with promises of rain, as I stepped over the concrete curb and into the wet grass. Rows and rows of granite stones spanned the lawn before me, in the section of Holy Cross where Eliza was supposedly buried. Water from earlier rains soaked through my shoes and into my socks, and the wind blew my hair into my mouth.
Vera already reached out to the cemetery in the hope of convincing them to reunite Eliza’s headstone with her grave. At first, someone told her they didn’t think it would be possible, but Vera eventually made some headway with higher-ups. A historian friend of mine said they might be reluctant, because old stones have to be set in new concrete, even small ones, and cemeteries often don’t want to foot the bill for that.
I visited the cemetery because finding information about Eliza’s gravesite on the web is one thing, but I wanted to see it in person. What would it feel like to visit the place where she was buried now? Would she have anything to tell me, like her husband — if that was indeed her husband — did two years ago?
The Holy Cross website claimed she’s in section H, in a space numbered 10-21/3. As I walked among the stones, I found numbers carved into the bottom corners of some of them. Downhill, they grew larger — 24, 34. So I climbed back up, and eventually found the 10s, starting with 10-60 and dropping into the 10-50s. Relief washed through me as I followed the trail, but soon the numbers became more random, with 12s and 14s, and other parts of the numerical scale altogether.
Frustration took hold of me, making my chest ache and my eyes sting with the threat of tears. A velvet-black crow, large as a chicken, landed on a nearby obelisk and cawed once before darting into the trees. Its wings rustled the air as they beat. Birds, those liminal creatures who live both on land and in the sky, often serve as messengers from the spirit world, but this one felt more like a warning.
The sky opened up and I dashed to my car, my feet soaked and my spirits deflated.
I wondered if Eliza didn’t want to be found.
***
As it turned out, I was looking in the wrong place — and I would never have found Eliza’s grave without help. It was to one side of a large, open lawn, far from the rows of headstones I’d searched before. On the sunny June morning when I returned to Holy Cross, cemetery workers had staked a small red flag in the soil where her bones rested, clover blooming around the thin metal flagpole.
There was nothing else to indicate where she was. A vast, blank lawn stretched around her, where tens of thousands of San Francisco’s early Catholic settlers rested in the soil. Their only memorial was a single monument at the edge of the grass, with three crosses carved in stone.
I was there with Vera and Susan Sperry, president of the Moraga Historical Society, to see Eliza’s headstone installed at Holy Cross. We shaded our eyes from the morning sun as two cemetery workers in blue polo shirts, Carlos and Osboldo, carefully lifted the 75-pound stone out of Susan’s hatchback and into the flatbed of their truck. They drove it to a spot along a border of marked graves, where a concrete base rested in the soil, a rectangular hollow waiting to receive the stone.
Vera wished aloud that she’d cleaned Eliza’s headstone before bringing it, but soon Carlos dipped a sponge into a bucket of clear water and brushed it across the marker, clearing away decades of dust and soil. He pressed it into the chiseled grooves that spelled out her name, where she was from, and when she died. My eyes misted as I watched him; he reminded me of the family members and death workers who bathe the bodies of the dead. That feeling of care and tending.
It had taken months to get to this day. Vera’s back-and-forth with the cemetery finally paid off when its general manager, John Bermudez, agreed to install Eliza’s gravestone at — or at least near — her grave.
“We know exactly where everyone is,” Bermudez told us. The cemetery has records going back to the start of Calvary Cemetery, including the names of everyone who’d been buried and moved, and where their graves were now.
But putting her marker over her bones would have meant laying it flat on the surface of the earth, rendering it almost invisible, so groundskeepers could drive their mowers over it. Instead, Carlos and Osboldo reclined the stone at an angle, making it much easier to see. Osboldo meticulously centered it before pouring and smoothing cement around the carved marble, a sculptor polishing his work.
“It feels almost like we’re at her funeral. I know she’s looking down on us, glad that this is happening,” Vera said as I watched the workers quietly.
A few weeks before bringing Eliza her headstone, I visited John at the National Cemetery. His cookie-cutter military grave marker glittered white in the bright sunlight as I laid a single yellow rose at the base of it. “We found your wife,” I told him, this time speaking the words out loud. “And we’re bringing her stone back to her in a few weeks. I hope that will help you find each other more easily.”
I didn’t hear any reply, but sensed a kind of peace, and maybe gratitude. Together his headstone and I looked out across the San Francisco Bay and Golden Gate Bridge, boats drifting past like so many souls on their way.
If they were with us that day at Holy Cross, John and Eliza’s spirits didn’t make themselves known to me. Earlier in the week, though, I’d been cooking dinner when I glimpsed a dark figure in the kitchen doorway, just feet from where I’d scented John and the lavender two and a half years earlier. But I’d been too tired and frazzled by other circumstances to connect with the visitor properly.
John, if that’s you, you’re welcome to come with me to Holy Cross, but please don’t hang around here, I’d thought. You’re making me uneasy. I saw that same figure a couple more times over the coming days, but I didn’t notice him with me on the way to the cemetery.
From the time of Vera’s first email to the day her stone was installed at Holy Cross, Eliza didn’t reach out to me, at least not directly. Perhaps connecting me with Vera, and pulling whatever invisible threads helped us re-mark her grave, was her way of communicating. Two days after bringing her grave marker to Holy Cross, though, I returned to give her a bouquet from my garden: Deep green fern; long, graceful stems of waverly salvia; a branch of rosemary for remembrance, all tied with blue ribbon.
I laid the bouquet by her stone, then sat down on a memorial bench next to it and looked out across the grass and clover blanketing the Calvary dead. Just then, a small songbird flitted out across the grass, looping and darting close to the ground. It was moving too quickly for me to identify the type of bird, but I knew it was a sign that Eliza was happy to be remembered and cared for.
My heart soared as the bird circled and slalomed before flying away to a neighboring section of the cemetery. I turned and whispered to Eliza, “you are remembered.” At that, the bird returned, swooping across the Calvary lawn once more, giving thanks for wings, buoyancy, the swiftness of life.
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