No people who turn their back on death can be alive. The presence of the dead among the living will be a daily fact in any society which encourages its people to live.

- From A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander

Either you like cemeteries and graveyards, or you don’t. Like a penchant for musicals or casinos or rooftop gardens, it’s usually one way or the other. I’d been visiting the dead all of my life. Some of them I knew in life, others I was meeting for the first time.

A visit to Lake Forest Cemetery was facilitated by bricks and an idea to build a backyard barbeque pit. I drove out to Lake Forest to pick up a load of Chicago common brick that had been advertised on Craigslist. It was a lovely soft spring day and since I’d never been to Lake Forest before I wanted to look around. I asked the brick merchant where I could park my car and go for a walk. She suggested I should keep going down the road to the cemetery. It was a great place for a walk, and—she looked pointedly at my brick-burdened 2001 Volkswagen—I wouldn’t attract attention.

Lake Forest is the North Shore’s swankiest community, where the average home value in 2009 was $850,000 and a used car cruising through the village is cause for suspicion. A short drive through winding roads lined with the houses of the richy rich and I was entering the imposing wrought iron gate of Lake Forest Cemetery. This was the Barrell Memorial Gate, built by Grace and Finley Barrell in memory of their son John who drowned in the Illinois River. Why a gate, I wondered. Why not a screaming angel or a bloody Jesus?

I looked around at the winding paths and the boxwood hedges, the lake vistas and tasteful gray granite monuments, the one-syllable names: HOLT, SWIFT, WOOD, REID—a.k.a. WASP. Not a bloody Jesus or a plastic geranium in sight. Designed by landscape architect O. C. Simonds in 1900, Lake Forest Cemetery is the epitome of the expression “resting place.” I felt my pulse slowing just walking around.

Among the many prominent names at Lake Forest Cemetery, three stood out for me: ARMOUR, SWIFT, and WILSON, representatives of Chicago’s meat mongerers. In case you’re taking notes, Andrew Watson Armour, III, (1908-1991) the great-great grandson of Philip Armour, is buried at Lake Forest. Philip Armour, an American captain of industry, the founder of Armour and Company, the slaughterhouse and meatpacking company, brought hot dogs to the world. Louis Franklin Swift (1861-1937) is also at Lake Forest. His business, Swift & Co., developed the first refrigerated railroad car so dead meat could travel in cool comfort. Thomas Edward Wilson (1868-1958), the founder of Wilson Sporting Goods and the Wilson and Company meatpacking company, was the cleanup guy. He took all the leftover animal bits from the meatpacking plant, like bladders and sinews, and made them into sporting goods.

They were so excessively alive, these pigs. And then, they were 
so excessively dead…

–Rudyard Kipling, American Notes

Rudyard Kipling visited the Chicago stockyards in 1889. He described it at as a tour through a swamp of blood, assaulted by the screams of dying animals and the noxious stench of dead meat, sweat, dung, and urine. By 1900 a million cows, sheep, and hogs were slaughtered every year at the Chicago stockyards.

Walking above the Lake Michigan shoreline on a glorious spring day, along paths beautifully landscaped with native plantings, among the sculpture park variety of mausoleums and monuments, nothing felt “excessively dead” in this place. One of the differences between a graveyard and a killing field may be the difference in their respective ghosts.

Years ago an ex and I were looking to buy some small acreage with a house within thirty miles from the Twin Cities. When we found an affordable six acres in St. Paul Park near the Mississippi River with a three-bedroom ranch house and several outbuildings we were hopeful and excited. We met the seller’s realtor at the property for a viewing. The house was empty, the garage half filled with taped boxes and building supplies. We checked out the barn last. The realtor opened the door and in the dim light we saw rows of small wire mesh cages stacked and lined up on both sides of the space. There was an acrid, oily, wild animal smell in the dusty air. It was a smell of broken hearts and crime scenes. What was this place, we asked, the empty cages yawning open accusingly. A mink farm. In the time it took to walk back to the car we had made our decision: no sale.

I was getting hungry. It was almost time for lunch.

I read an article that was published in the New Yorker in 1939 about “beefsteaks” in New York City. Beefsteak was the term used for a private steak dinner party that consisted of steak, lamb chops, lamb kidneys, and pitchers of beer—all you could eat and drink for $5. An average beefsteak might serve 350 men and women with 35 sides of beef, 450 double-rib lamb chops, and 450 lamb kidneys—no napkins or silverware. Eating with your fingers was protocol.

On my way out of town I stopped at a neighborhood joint for a burger. Framed, autographed pictures of beefy boys crowded the walls. The headquarters of the Chicago Bears is in Lake Forest. I ate the burger with my hands.

Slaughtered meat and dead bodies are most effectively connected in the short film Meat Love by Czech filmmaker . Jan Svankmajer
. Two red and juicy slabs of steak depict the lifecycle of a relationship from meeting through courtship and passionate love to death. From red meat to dead meat—in one minute. It just usually takes a little longer for the rest of us.