The Moving Dead
The 405 South, south of Irvine, is a slog. A monotony of rolling, uninspired hills, tract housing, and the Pacific, which, seen every day since birth, is no longer an ocean so much as background.
It was there that I met Anna Marie Osorio, and stalked her for a good twenty miles, which is how we mark time in Southern California.
I don’t know how she died, whether she was loved extravagantly or adequately, or if the driver still wakes at 3 a.m. with a gasp and the merciful millisecond before memory catches up. All I know is what the gothic vinyl script on the 2023 Accord in front of me tells me: her name, that she didn’t live to see twenty-one, and that someone loved her enough to start a GoFundMe.
One hour north sits Hollywood Forever, a century-old cemetery and final resting place of Bugsy Siegel, Judy Garland, and Johnny Ramone. On summer weekends they project classic movies against the Cathedral Mausoleum. People bring chairs, blankets, and booze.
Not everyone at Hollywood Forever is famous, or from this hemisphere.
The Russian section, yes, there is a Russian section, is full of men who spent their often short lives trying to avoid the spotlight.
Their headstones aren’t headstones, more like monuments. Black marble, refrigerator sized slabs polished to mirror finish, etched in photographic detail with the faces of dead, unsmiling men who made their portraitists deeply uneasy. The Cyrillic script is aggressive, the scale Soviet, perversely so, as these men spent considerable efforts avoiding Soviets.
Infinite legacies are not cheap, especially when you’re competing with the gangster in the adjoining crypt, and these monstrosities regularly land north of a quarter million dollars.
Nature will do what it does to monoliths, Georgian or otherwise. They will outlast anyone who remembers why they were built, but fewer people will see them in a thousand years than will see Anna Marie’s name on a sunny SoCal day.
Her legacy will live on another three to five years, depending on the lease.
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