I love discovering quirky little towns. After a day of sightseeing in San Francisco, my daughter and I discovered Colma. Colma happens to be the closest BART station to her home. As we walked through the BART parking garage, I spied the rolling hills of a cemetery. Since we weren’t in a rush, my daughter accommodated my unusual hobby of looking for angel statues in cemeteries.
Colma has a lot of cemeteries. In fact, on the town’s website, it states that it is known worldwide as the “City of Souls” with 1,500 residents and 1.5 million souls spread out over 16 cemeteries. That’s 1,000 souls per resident.
So I asked myself, how did they get here? (Yes, I love paraphrasing the Talking Head lyrics from “Once in a Lifetime.”) The reason that Colma became the final resting place of so many folks is because land in San Francisco got too expensive. From 1900 through 1912, San Francisco passed two ordinances that not only stopped interring the dead, but also evicted those buried within the city limits.
We drove and walked through the Japanese, Jewish and Italian cemeteries. I soon discovered that if you are looking for statues, an Italian cemetery is the place to go. Below are a few of the beautiful angels I photographed (click on them for enlargement).
Further exploration into the Italian cemetery took us to rows upon rows of tombstones with smaller angels. As we read the inscriptions, we realized we had entered a very holy space. Tears filled our eyes and our hearts grew heavy. We’d found the children’s cemetery. I stopped taking pictures and took some moments to reflect on what had happened here.
Most of the dates were from long ago, in the 1920’s and 1930’s, and I thought perhaps an epidemic had hit the area. But the bubonic plague of San Francisco was twenty years earlier. Back home in San Diego, curiosity inspired me to find out more. A quick call to the cemetery revealed that there wasn’t an epidemic or plague, but rather the cemetery filled naturally over the years.
I’d like to end on a lighter note. In 2006, Colma chose a new town motto: “It’s great to be alive in Colma.”
