An Interview with Roberta Halporn, the Death Lady of Brooklyn, November 2004

 

Death Becomes Her

By Dylan Foley

The New York Press

Published Nov 2, 2004 

I interviewed Roberta Halporn 10 years before she died in 2014 at age 86. Roberta was a great soul, who devoted 35 years of her life running the Center of Thanatology on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn.

Because of a tragic family history, where she was not allowed to grieve for her father's death  when she was five, Roberta developed a lifelong career helping people come to terms to death. Roberta's center in an old church contained thousands of books on death and death rituals. One of her first projects in the pre-Internet age of the 1980's, was to act as a free referral service for death counselors. She collected 2,000 names of death professionals and directed grieving callers to people in their areas.

Roberta also operated a small press,  gleefully published small pamphlets on grave rubbing in Brooklyn and Chinese death rituals.

Roberta was also an accomplished grave rubber, going to cemeteries around the country, pursuing such bold-faced names as Malcolm X, Edgar Allen Poe and Wild Bill Cody.

 When I spoke with Roberta in 2004, her concern was that her life work would not be passed on. Her heir apparent had lost interest in thanatology, the study of death. Roberta noted stoically that it was possible that her books and grave rubbings would be put on the street.

By the time Roberta died in 20014, a better solution had arisen. Roberta's books and scholarly materials on death were safely held by the special collections at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where they are available for scholarly study.

Roberta Halporn was a great humanist who caused about making death less scary and accessible to her fellow humans. Rest in peace, Roberta.

Here is my 2004 interview, which took place right before Halloween: 

AS ROBERTA HALPORN made coffee in the small kitchen in the back of her Brooklyn office on a gloomy October afternoon, she lit another cigarette. "Modern paperwork is killing me," she said, grumbling about mortgages and phone bills. "It is making me smoke more."

The 77-year-old Halporn is a former modern dancer who stands a few inches below five feet. "When I was a dancer, I was five feet tall," she says, moving into a room full of skeleton dolls, grave rubbings of the dead and famous and a coffin bookcase.

"But who knows how tall I am now."

The office is in an old church on Atlantic Ave., near Boerum Hill. This is where Halporn runs her one-woman nonprofit, the Center for Thanatology Research and Education Inc.

Thanatology is the study of death, and that's what Halporn does-study everything about death. She runs a referral service for people in need of grief counselors, publishes books on cemeteries and gravestone art and sells t-shirts that say "Happy Valley Cemetery Pit Crew," with an image of two skeletons digging a grave that "sell really well."

The purpose of the center, Halporn said, is to make people think about death. "If people think they will live forever, they will not live a full life. Your life should be influenced by thinking about mortality."

Halporn's own road to studying death was filled with family heartbreak. "My father died when I was five," she said. "My people, the Jews, make a big deal out of the funerals, and everybody attended. But my father wasn't discussed after that. It was like he didn't exist." Despite having a childhood filled with older relatives dying long painful deaths, she was never allowed to grieve properly. As an adult, she became a dancer, then went into publishing. She took over the death and dying line of a legal press, and a new career was born.

The large storefront office is full of books and papers, as well as stacks of Halporn's nearly 1000 grave rubbings, including those of Edgar Allan Poe, Ben Franklin and Malcolm X. The coffin bookshelf holds skeleton salt-and-pepper shakers and hand-bone refrigerator magnets. "I think I'm successful because I have a sense of humor," she said.

The Center for Thanatology was started 24 years ago when Halporn bought the Atlantic Ave. building and set out to change American attitudes toward death. Since then, Halporn has published books and pamphlets on death and graveyards. She has also become an expert on grave rubbings and tombstone craftsmanship.

"Seventy years ago, we never discussed death? It is almost over-the-top now, with people counseling on death, like social workers and psychologists."

Popular culture has had some effect on discussing mortality, Halporn noted. Shows like Six Feet Under and Dead Like Me have made death a conversation topic.

"Americans are beginning to think people die? The topic is finally now being addressed, and we are creeping toward a better understanding of dying."

Academia is also gradually moving toward studying death and death rituals. Brooklyn College had one of the first thanatology programs in the country, and Olympic marathon runner Seana Carmean recently outed herself as a thanatology studies major at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

New York University's thanatology program, however, died after the sole thanatology specialist retired.

Some death subcultures, however, flummox Halporn. "One extreme is the goth kids," said Halporn, "who take on the manifestations of death," with their black clothes, black fingernails and white make up.

At the center, light filters through old church windows, revealing floor-to-ceiling bookcases built with a recent grant. An ashtray full of smokeable coffin nails sat on a desk, and a grave rubbing of six 18th-century infant gravestones from one family hangs high on the wall. (Grave rubbings are made by taping a piece of paper on a tombstone and passing a colored block of wax over the paper. The wax creates an image of the epitaph. Halporn sells kits that contain acid-free paper and imported wax for $20.)

Halporn's publications range from an early primer introducing school kids to graveyards to her best-selling book New York Is a Rubber's Paradise: A Guide to New York City Cemeteries in the Five Boroughs, which capitalizes on the popular tours of the city's 132 cemeteries.

Halporn is an accomplished grave rubber. Some of her handiwork is mounted on the office wall. She has gone around the country, grave rubbing the famous and infamous. On a mountainside in Colorado, she clambered over a fence to get into Buffalo Bill Cody's gravesite to get a rubbing of his tombstone. She got trapped behind the fence, and the cab driver who brought her to the grave had to pull her out. She also went to Texas to get Bonnie Parker, the young gun moll of the Bonnie and Clyde bank robbery team from the 1930s, who specialized in murdering small-town sheriffs.

"Here is the voodoo queen Marie Laveau," she says proudly, showing a rubbing of a New Orleans tombstone from 1897.

Exploring thanatology in America reveals a network of obscure death-related organizations. Halporn is an active member in the Association for Gravestone Studies, a Massachusetts-based organization. She whispered details of the civil war going on between two camps, grave rubbers like her and the more prevalent gravestone photographers.

"I think the gravestone photographers are anal. They are afraid to get down in the dirt at the foot of a gravestone, for that's what you have to do when you are a grave rubber."

Sometimes the photographer-rubber battle heats up in specific graveyards. According to Halporn, a woman gravestone photographer with influence with the Trinity Church hierarchy has seen to it that grave rubbers are banned from Trinity's venerable and popular small cemetery.

Though Halporn handles her daily work on all things macabre with humor and stoicism, there are personal tolls. "I am only human," she said. "I am affected by events like 9/11, or the death of a close friend."

She has no regrets over years of running the center in a fist-to-mouth existence. "We have to go after our dreams. God forbid, if the ceiling came down on us now, I'd have lived a very rich life. I have done a lot for people without them really knowing it."

Even though Halporn has had a will for decades and thinks about death every day, she admitted some fears. "I am still going to be scared by death," she said. "I am worse than an agnostic. I don't believe in a future after death. I do take solace from my culture. I go to temple."

For years, the center has been funded by salaries that came from Halporn as teacher, as librarian and as editor, but these jobs have dried up. "With no outside income, it has become much harder to run the center."

After 24 years, the future of the Center for Thanatology Research and Education is in jeopardy. "I had somebody lined up to succeed me, but her interests changed," said Halporn.

"It is possible that my artwork, all my rubbings," she said matter-of-factly, "will just wind up on the sidewalk."

Original article, New York Press