Twice buried - F. Scott & Zelda Fitzgerald

(Credit: Richard Anderson and broadstreetonline.org)

F. Scott Fitzgerald died on this date, December 21, in 1940. Yesterday I posted on the novelist’s last written words.

According to broadstreetonline.org the photo above of the Fitzgerald’s first resting place was taken by Richard Anderson in 1970 and is the only such photograph known to exist and to be available to the public.

The couple were buried in Rockville Cemetery, Scott, in 1940, and Zelda in 1948. Subsequently, in the mid-1970s, they were reinterred at St. Marys Cemetery, Rockville, Maryland.

There is more to the story (which I’m researching for a proposed book) but a brief version appeared in The Washingtonian in 2015. Scott died in California, Zelda “knew that Fitzgerald wished to be buried in his family plot in the Catholic cemetery in Rockville. So, she instructed those in care of his body to send him back east. There was one problem with that, though: Fitzgerald’s tenuous relationship to the Catholic faith.

“When Fitzgerald arrived to the cemetery, the church that owned the cemetery at the time refused his burial. According to witnesses, it was because he had not fulfilled his ‘Easter duties.’

“Fitzgerald’s hard-living reputation had followed him to his grave. Instead, Zelda paid for him to be buried a mile down the road in Rockville Cemetery. In 1948, Zelda joined him when she died tragically in a fire at Highland. She was buried on top of him because Zelda had only bought one space. That’s where they sat for 27 years.

“In 1975, members of the Rockville Women’s Club noticed the Fitzgeralds’ grave was crumbling and deteriorating. Talking with family members revealed that the Fitzgeralds should have been buried down the road. The case was taken to the Archbishop of Washington, William Baum, who immediately gave his blessing to allow the Fitzgerald’s to be reburied at St. Mary’s Church Cemetery. In a statement, he said that Fitzgerald was ‘an artist who was able with lucidity and poetic imagination to portray the struggle between grace and death . . . His characters are involved in this great drama, seeking God and seeking grace.’”

The photo below is from my visit earlier this year to St.Mary’s Church Historic Cemetery in Rockville, Maryland. Written on their gravestone is the last line from The Great Gatsby: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” May they rest in peace.