Years ago I spotted a marker at St. Michael’s Cemetery that haunted me. The marker for Walter Weinhofer, an infant who lived just one day, was upside down. I’d never seen such a thing, and it had me thinking it was done deliberately, as a kind of statement about the unfairness of mortality, how most of us take our days for granted while others never even got a chance to experience more than one.
I did enough research to conclude that no such practice exists in the funerary world. Instead of rejecting the traditional placement of a gravesite marker as a way of saying fuck you to the whims and caprices of life itself this was, quite to the contrary, just some asshole’s idea of a joke.
Inverted Tombstone of Walter Weinhofer
I remembered this photo a couple of months ago, or at least I thought I did. My memory said the inverted stone was in the shape of a cross. Indeed, there is a cross seen on the stone but the marker itself is rectangular. I went out to St. Michael’s looking for this marker expecting it to be a cross, and of course did not find it.
With the aid of this rediscovered photo I went back today and found that someone did the right thing, and turned the marker right side up. St. Michael’s is not my favorite NYC cemetery for a lot of reasons but they deserve some credit for noticing this and doing something about it. I would guess this marker has had zero visitors for generations but that is no excuse for letting vandals make a mockery of it.
Walter Weinhofer Tombstone Made Right
It would be interesting to know how long it was upside down, and if cemetery workers noticed it on their own or if a visitor brought it to their attention. This is in Section 4C, where it seems most if not all burials are of very young children.
I forgot that I wrote about this four years ago but did not go as far as attempting a photo. The first photo is from 2006. This has been on my mind for a long time.
