ABOUT ALL SOULS
AT MOUNTAIN VIEW CEMETERY

Background

Honouring our dead with community rituals of remembrance is a global tradition.
For many cultures around the world, the days at the end of October and beginning of November are considered an important time for remembering the dead in our lives, through ceremony and celebration, and the practical maintenance of the family gravesites. Customs include cleaning and decorating graves, feasts, flowers, lanterns, and candles.

In our modern, urban, and relatively transient culture, traditional “village” customs have been left behind, though not the human impulses and needs that led to these traditions.

For 20 years, All Souls at Mountain View Cemetery provided public shrines, materials for the creation of personal memorials, and other opportunities for people to write messages, light candles, and speak the names of the dead. Often there was live music, and small fires to gather around.

The event was opened at sundown with prayers and a Swedish Fire – a vertical log that would burn throughout the evening- and closed with a procession to the shrines on November 1st.

The candles at the shrines were kept lit until the morning of November 2nd, when the written messages and memorials would be gathered up the names read out loud, before being burned in a closing fire.

All Souls at Mountain View Cemetery was part of the revival of the role of this urban cemetery in the life of an increasingly secular and multi-cultural community. It became an important annual tradition for people from many different cultural backgrounds and traditions, from young families who embraced the event as an opportunity to introduce the subject of mortality to their children, to the recently bereaved who have their children, parents, partners and friends interred at MVC.

History

The first All Souls at Mountain View Cemetery was October 29, 2005. Curated by artists Paula Jardine and Marina Szijarto, this unique cultural event offered the public an opportunity to remember their dead, whether interred at Mountain View Cemetery or not, in a gentle atmosphere of contemplative beauty.

It grew out of the artist’s personal experiences with death, their work together in community arts, and a research project to understand their role as artists in the sacred life of the community. They felt a personal need – and perceived a community need – to find ways to acknowledge our losses, and honour our dead, in ways that felt true.

They began with Marina Szijarto’s Triptych, three painted boards that invited people to write the names of their beloved dead. After each year the boards would be black with names and heartfelt messages, and each year Marina would paint a thin wash of paint over these messages, ready for the next outpouring of love and remembrance.

The work evolved in collaboration with the cemetery and the public, in large part thanks to the Master Plan, developed through public consultation, and manager Glen Hodges’ enlightened vision of the role of the cemetery as a community space.

During All Souls, the Cemetery was often filled with live ambient music – from a variety of cultures – and over the years there were many other ‘offerings’ for engagement, including poetry, digital projections, hands on craft based mourning ceremonies, photography displays and indigenous ceremony with local Coast Salish musicians & elders.

The tradition changed and grew, responding to how people interacted with the shrines and other offerings created for All Souls. Activities expanded once the celebration hall was built, to include commissioned music, workshops, storytelling and other presentations, all with honouring the dead as the foundation.

The experiences were enhanced by being held in an actual cemetery, where sacred space was intentionally created.

The diversity of programming attracted wide participation, expanding awareness of the cemetery and its new facilities.

Over the years All Souls created both ‘community’ shrines for any and all to be remembered, as well as some more focused shrines: for newborn babies and stillborn deaths; suicide loss; murdered and missing indigenous women; accidental drug overdose; victims of hate (particularly in the Jewish community), lgbtq2+ members, the unnamed dead from mental institutions ( Riverview), migrant / border crossing deaths,  individuals who honoured specific friends and family, and multiple artist made shrines, responding to personal griefs, community losses, and world events.

Civic Asset

All Souls at Mountain View Cemetery addressed aspects of the Master Plan Guiding Principles including:

• maintain a sacred sanctuary where people can honour the memory of their ancestors
• inclusive and reflective of Vancouver’s cultural diversity
• nurturing a place that is part of the community identity
• make the cemetery as much a civic space for the living as for the dead.

Pages 11/12, “Mountain View Cemetery Master Plan” January, 2000

• “Final Dispositions” a symposium bringing together artists, cemetery, hospice and funeral professionals, to explore available and emerging options including green burial.
• Open House and Culture Days activities
• Historical interpretive walks
• Family friendly memorial making
• Mourners Teas; community conversations about death and mourning from personal experience.

Throughout the years, All Souls at Mountain View Cemetery has been touched, changed and inspired by the many artists, community participants and members of the public who have shared their love and regard for their dead.

There are people who have come every year, and children who cannot remember a time when there wasn’t a sacred annual event at their civic cemetery. It has been a privilege to be part of developing this deeply meaningful new tradition for the community that MVC serves.

The Artists would like to thank Glen Hodges, Manager at Mountain View Cemetery, who championed the idea of artists creating a sacred event in our municipal cemetery. Glen worked within the Cemetery Master Plan and CoV Community Services structures to provide and facilitate this much appreciated, community-recognized and important tradition.

ABOUT THE ORGANIZERS