Burial à la Mode

<B una 1 a La Mode CANNON PORTER THE high cost of living is only exceeded by the high cost of dying. Funerals the world over have become our greatest extravagance. Somehow we cannot bargain with death. Death is expensive: from the Yuma Indian burning his dead along with his home, his clothes, and all his household effects to the East Indian widow com- mitting suttee by throwing herself upon the funeral pyre of her hus- band. Human beings are the most val- uable things in the world. Real estate men claim that every man, woman or child that goes into a community adds a value of $2,- 700.00 to the locality. The des- truction of life was the greatest waste of the world war. Roads and cities, cathedrals and ships, can all be replaced eventually, but the man-power — young genius cut down in its strength, will effect the unborn for hundreds of years. Per- haps the biggest disgrace in this modern age is the number of people who die annually of preventable diseases. But this article has to do with the rites after death. TF beauty can soften the wrench of the parting with loved ones, Forest Lawn Memorial park lying between Los Angeles and Glendale in Southern California has tried to accomplish it. In a natural set- ting of great beauty in a semi- tropical climate it has all that the landscape gardener and human in- genuity can devise to robe death in transcendent loveliness. England has sent her poetry, La belle France her art, Italy her marbles, Greece her sculpture, the Orient its mystic rites, to spread the poppy leaf over this ultra- modern cemetery of the new world. A Tower of Legends CTARK against the sky-line, at *^ the top of a brown hill stands the gray "Tower of Legends." It is really a water tank. One of the legends about it is that the bodies of the movie stars lie in state here. At night it is surmounted by an immense cross of light. The Little Church of the Flowers "VTEAR the entrance gate to the ^ grounds is the "Little Church of the Flowers." This is an exact replica of the church at Stoke Pogis where Gray, seated on a tombstone, wrote his Elegy, the most famous poem in the English language, which ends with that tribute to the obscure: "Full many a gem of purest ray serene The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear; Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air." The inside of the Little Church is banked with growing flowers which make it a veritable conserv- atory. Amid the tropic ferns twit- ter canary birds. Sometimes one of these feathered songsters will sing through an entire service. No charge is made for the use of the church where interment takes place in Forest Lawn, but services are limited to an hour's duration. The casket rests on a dais at the back, flanked by an alcove for mourners. Among the (Continued on page 509)