Contemplating the carnage at California's most historic cemetery

If you find it difficult to grasp the magnitude of the deaths caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, you are not alone. In the face of mass casualties, many of us have chosen the path of denial, accepting conspiracy theories, resisting public health orders, and wallowing in anger and anxiety.

So let me offer you a healthier alternative that will help you survive the carnage. Visit the largest and most beautiful cemetery you can find. I recommend the original Forest Lawn, the first of the six Forest Lawn Memorial Parks. This place is so extensive that there are graves in two cities, Glendale and Los Angeles.

I recently spent two days walking all 290 acres of Forest Lawn-Glendale, our state's most historic and California cemetery, and found that it cleared my thoughts and even improved my mood.

This site also helped me put into perspective all the human cost of COVID-19. Since Forest Lawn opened here 114 years ago in 1906, 340,000 souls have been buried on this property. Current projections are that 340,000 people in the United States will die of COVID sometime by January, which is 10 months after the March lockdown began.

These numbers also made me think of Colma, a beautiful and haunted city of cemeteries in the Bay Area just south of San Francisco. This necropolis, which has existed for more than a century, has been the final resting place for an estimated 1.5 million people. Worldwide, there will be 1.5 million confirmed COVID deaths before Christmas.

Such statistics are sobering and tragic. They also reflect a fundamental human failing: We are acutely aware of individual deaths, but struggle to recognize deaths in the aggregate. This is why we can rally more forcefully in response to a single death, such as the killing of George Floyd by police officers, than we can in response to the growing number of COVID deaths scrolling across our screens.

Our short-sightedness is why we need cemeteries now, and not just as places to bury our dead.

"Cemeteries are not just places to reflect on the past," wrote longtime Forest Lawn supervisor John Llewellyn in the book " A Cemetery Should Be Forever." "They remind us of the need to remember the present."

Especially, perhaps, when the present is so frightening.

Forest Lawn's mission, laid down by its first manager and builder, Hubert Eaton, was to give death a sunny California touch. An innovator like many other Golden State institutions, Forest Lawn was the first "memorial park," the first to prohibit headstones (ground signs that did not obstruct the view were required), and the first to provide all the services necessary for death - cemetery, crematory, church, flower store, mausoleum, columbarium, and mortuary - on one site.

"I believe in a happy eternal life," Eaton wrote in Forest Lawn's "Builder's Creed" in 1917. "Therefore, I know that today's cemeteries are wrong because they depict an end rather than a beginning." To better serve humanity, he promised, "I shall endeavor to build in Forest Lawn a Great Park, devoid of shapeless monuments and other usual signs of earthly death, but filled with tall trees, broad lawns, splashing fountains, singing birds, beautiful statues, cheerful flowers, noble memorial architecture with interiors full of light and color, and fragrant with the best history and romance in the world."

Forest Lawn has been subjected to relentless satire (Evelyn Waugh in her 1948 novel Beloved ) and criticism (Jessica Mitford in her 1963 exposé " The American Way of Death" ). Serious people refer to it as the "Disneyland of Death." But at this particular moment, visiting the happiest cemetery on Earth seemed soothing and thought-provoking.

Since Forest Lawn opened here 114 years ago in 1906, 340,000 people have been buried on the property. Current projections indicate that there will be 340,000 COVID deaths in the United States in January.

I came across joggers, cyclists, landscape painters and people walking their children in strollers. From afar, I listened to funerals full of jokes and laughter. I heard birdsong while enjoying a 360-degree view of Los Angeles from the esplanade. Half a dozen people chatted amicably about the weather while admiring "Secret Life," a sculptural group of 18 human figures gathered around a stream that flows from an unseen source to an unknown destination.

By its usual standards, Forest Lawn was fairly quiet. The art museum, which houses an important collection of stained glass windows, the world's largest black opal, and William Bouguereau's painting "Song of the Angels," painted in 1881, was closed. School tours were not conducted on the museum grounds. Tens of thousands of people, including Ronald Reagan, have been married at Forest Lawn, but there were no weddings in the three churches in the cemetery, which were locked, at the time of my visit.

Still, I liked that the place resembles Southern California in miniature, with its varying topography (windswept hills, cool valleys, sprawling basin), cultural mishmash (Italian statues, Scottish and Irish churches, crypts with inscriptions in every modern Asian language) and an obsession with being big (Forrest Lawn notes that its large wrought iron gates are twice the width of Buckingham Palace and the Crucifixion Hall houses "the world's largest permanently installed religious painting").

Forest Lawn is probably the best place in Tinseltown to get close to a celebrity: everyone from Walt Disney to Jean Harlow to Michael Jackson is buried here, although you'll have to do some detective work as the staff won't tell you where they are. I was able to find the famous early 20th century preacher from Los Angeles, Aimee Semple McPherson, who in her "Divine Healing" sermons advised "secluded in the desert in silence and stillness before God."

I found a powerful stillness in the Grand Mausoleum, where I chatted with a woman searching for the crypt of Paramahansa Yogananda, the Indian guru who popularized yoga and meditation in the United States. And I laughed when I learned that the crypt of California Governor Culbert Olson, a noted atheist, was a stone's throw from the stained-glass reproduction of Da Vinci's "Last Supper" in the mausoleum.

Down the hill from the mausoleum is an older and flatter section of the cemetery, so filled with light that it feels like the porch of heaven. There I walked among the many graves from 1918 and 1919. Most of the people buried in them died in their teens, twenties, and thirties, the most common age of Spanish flu victims.

From there I made my way to Freedom Court, where there is a mosaic reproduction of John Trumbull's painting, "The Signing of the Declaration of Independence," which is three times the size of the original, which is in the U.S. Capitol. I read the text of the Declaration inscribed next to the painting and reflected on Jefferson's wisdom in putting "life" before "liberty" and "the pursuit of happiness."

Death is constant, of course, but the speed of this pandemic is overwhelming us, wreaking havoc on both the living and the dead.

We are in such a desperate rush to end COVID that we try to ignore its realities. It seems that we will forget this era as quickly as we can.

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We must never forget the pandemic. We must all remember its lessons, honor its victims and its heroes, to see its afterlife as a beginning, not an end. Here in California, I hope that we memorialize each of those who died from the pandemic by putting up a beautiful, colorful, and large monument that people will enjoy when they visit it.