THE IMPORTANCE OF A RESTING PLACE.

Byline: Karen McCowan The Register-Guard

Living Among Headstones

By Shannon Applegate

(Thunder's Mouth Press, 302 pages, $24)

YONCALLA - If you live in a small town, if you ever lived in a small town, if you ever wished you lived in a small town, this book is for you.

Officially, some bookstores are classifying "Living Among Headstones" as a memoir. And, reading the first sentence, that might seem a fair characterization:

"When I told my father I would take responsibility for the cemetery," Applegate begins, "I did not reckon on having to bury my friends."

The book is a reflection on her first seven years as sexton of her hometown's pioneer cemetery. And she doesn't hesitate to include her own feelings - particularly in chapters on burying her brother, father and granddaughter.

But Applegate's first-person approach doesn't devolve into narcissism. Instead, it lends an everywoman's matter-of-factness to a story about a still-taboo subject in American culture: burying our dead.

"Lee and Dana as fertilizer," she writes of longtime neighbors who want their ashes co-mingled in a vase and used for nourishing a lavender or lily plant. "Bone meal. That made sense."

The book is at times a wry local history, as Applegate continues the insider's look at her Oregon pioneer ancestors begun in her Oregon Book Award finalist, ``Skookum.''

At other points, it dips into anthropology as she examines burial traditions in other cultures - some so universal they are also deeply buried in ours.

But at its heart, this book is a love letter to small town life and the intimacy that comes with decades in the same, local orbit. Like such towns, it's never in a hurry. It prefers understatement to hyperbole. And it reveals things about people you would never learn in suburbia: The female, World War II Navy doctor who became Yoncalla's longtime physician, making house calls (for only a dollar) though she never learned to drive; the doctor's husband, a plywood worker and wildflower expert, who drove her on those house calls; the retired Church of the Brethren minister who once marched for civil rights alongside Martin Luther King Jr.

The true life - and death - stories of such Yoncalla residents are the threads that pull the book's elements together.

In a recent interview, Applegate said "Living Among Headstones" arose when her cemetery duties kept her from the novel she had planned to write.

"The sense of responsibility for all the things I had to do up here started gobbling up my time," she said of the forested cemetery. "So I started writing about that. It was a diary at first. Because of all my historical research, I have a great respect for that genre: the greenness, the presentness, the writer not knowing what will happen next."

She soon realized she had stumbled into a literary motherlode - "the lore, customs and traditions that put in perspective this experience of death that every human being goes through."

She learned that even our most modern traditions - driving in funeral processions with our automobile lights on, for example - are near-universal vestiges of ancient practices.

"People used to carry torches in funeral processions because they buried their dead at night, wearing black to disguise themselves so they wouldn't distract the spirits of the dead from the process they were going through," she said. "Something about those connections with all the world makes going through a death less lonely."

The biggest lesson learned in taking care of a cemetery, Applegate said, is tolerance. Part of her duties were supposed to include enforcing the pioneer cemetery's rules against plastic flowers.

"But you have to have compassion for people's need to do things in different ways," she said. Fresh flowers cost too much for some people - not to mention tombstones. Applegate recalls being moved by one hand-painted rock that served as a makeshift headstone: "It's blood-red writing, with decorative gold squiggles. It says in simple present tense: `You are loved.' ''

A plastic "My Little Pony" doll, Scoobie Doo figurines - even "glow in the dark rubber snakes" are among the items she's found at children's graves.

"What if I had a child who died, and all my resources had been sucked into a sinkhole of hospital expenses?" she asks.

The book also questions the increasing popularity of cremation and scattered ashes.

"Writing this book has totally changed my mind about that," Applegate said. "Being every place is being no place. There is something deep and significant about standing on ancestral ground. And for most people today, the only such ground is a grave."

CAPTION(S):

Writer Shannon Applegate (right) hugs her cousin Susan at the gravesite of her great-great grandparents in the Applegate Pioneer Cemetery. Shannon Applegate's book, ``Living Among Headstones'' features illustrations by Susan Applegate.