If a burial is happening at Anchorage Memorial Park Cemetery, Rob Jones is somewhere on the scene.
He gets there before anyone else to set up equipment and staging areas. Then he fades into the distance. You might spot him standing with ground crews. Or sitting in a maroon golf cart, poised to help if necessary. On a recent Friday, Jones sat in the cart, looking on as a group gathered around a vault and a casket that had just been lowered into a hole in the northeast part of the cemetery.
As director of Anchorage's city-owned cemetery, Jones' window into life, death and mourning is one that few ever peer through. He shoulders a strong sense of responsibility. People marry more than once in a lifetime, and graduate more than once from school, he says.
"But this is just a one-time thing," said Jones, 51, with a solemn smile. "And if we don't get it right the first time, we haven't really done our duties."
With close-cropped gray hair, a neat mustache and the earnest enthusiasm of a soccer coach, Jones is the good-natured steward of the Anchorage cemetery, which celebrated its centennial this summer. He led an effort to bring interactive technology to the wall where cremated remains are stored, and pushed to change rules about upright markers -- which until last year, with some religious exceptions, weren't allowed in the newer parts of the cemetery for aesthetic reasons. He came up with the idea for using live actors in the cemetery's hugely popular summer tours, to help make the cemetery a more welcoming place.
Perhaps the biggest part of what Jones does, however, is talk to people about the inevitable. He's used to explaining, gently, how decomposition works, how to finance a cemetery plot and what a vault is used for.
"You want to take the mystery out of the thing," Jones said, sitting in the cart, his eyes on the funeral service in the distance. "People don't have much experience with what we do."
As he spoke, the funeral he was supervising appeared to be coming to a close. Mourners were beginning to disperse to cars parked along the narrow road running through the cemetery. It was time for Jones to head back to his office near the cemetery entrance, but first, he steered the golf cart toward the western side of the cemetery, one of its oldest tracts, for a brief tour.
Along the way, Jones pointed out former Gov. Walter J. Hickel's vertical grave -- Hickel was famously buried standing up -- as well as the graves of other recognizable figures.
Jones said the cemetery tries not to make distinctions between the Hickels and the John Does.
"For us, death is the great equalizer," he said.
On the western tract, near Cordova Avenue, Jones pointed out the grave of a man named John Parks. Parks was buried in 1915, and for 99 years, the city believed him to be the first person buried in the cemetery.
Very little was known about Parks. For the cemetery's centennial, two volunteers from the Anchorage Genealogical Society offered to gather some information. When they reported back to Jones, their findings were mixed. The good news was that there was a wealth of information available on Parks.
The bad: Parks actually wasn't the first person to be buried in the cemetery. That distinction actually belonged to a laborer named Frank Amastoy, who is buried about 15 yards away from Parks. Jones said Amastoy was clearing trees on the new Anchorage townsite and died when one fell on him.
"The irony of ironies about it is, he's buried under one of the oldest trees we have," Jones said, looking up at the birch tree shadowing Amastoy's grave.
A little later, Jones paused at the grave of a 12-year-old boy who died of leukemia in 1981. The boy, James Coffield, wrote his own epitaph. The final line read: "Leukemia is the worst thing that has ever happened to me." A few years ago, Jones encountered the funeral director for the boy's family, who was visiting the grave. The funeral director choked up as he told Jones the story.
That's the tricky thing about the funeral business, Jones said. It's hard not to get emotional. And you can't think about it too much, he said. Death is terribly unfair in many ways.
"It is what it is. That's life," Jones said. "It just happens to be the very end of it."
Two decades ago, Jones never would have imagined himself in the job. He was born in Kotzebue and spent most of his childhood in Anchorage. His father was an episcopal priest, his mother a nurse, an upbringing anchored in empathy, an understanding of religion and in a willingness to talk about difficult subjects. He later majored in journalism at the University of Wyoming, where he also hosted a late-night radio rock show.
After graduation Jones spent years working as a line cook, including at the Prince Hotel at Alyeska Ski Resort, and coached youth soccer at the Boys and Girls Club. While he was coaching, one of his friends, a funeral director who helped sponsor the soccer team, watched Jones interact with the families on the team. He offered Jones a job at the funeral home. Jones didn't take it seriously at first.
"'Who would want to work at a funeral home?' I remember saying that so clearly," Jones said, chuckling. But he eventually took the job, figuring he at would at least get to wear a suit and a pager.
No one told him that when the pager went off at 3 a.m., Jones had to put on the suit, and get moving. But he also started working with families, and that's when it got meaningful, he said. He was meeting between three and four families a day and attending burials at every church in Anchorage.
"It wasn't just a job," Jones said. "You're helping folks out. That's how I got hooked."
After eight years as a funeral director, Jones became the city cemetery director. He was hired, he said, because he was good with people, but he also suddenly had to know the ins and outs of small-engine repair, trimming trees and mixing concrete. There's a bit of politics in the position too -- as a city executive, he works for the mayor.
In the cemetery, Jones sees less of the intense grief for someone who has just died. Instead, it's the quiet visits and sustained grief that a person will carry for the rest of their lives. That's why it's so important, he said, that the 22-acre grounds look well-maintained, the staff is pleasant and knowledgeable and the cemetery feels like a safe, comfortable place.
Back in his office, Jones sometimes keeps the clock radio tuned to the KWHL rock station during the day. He talks to whoever walks in the door.
One woman came in to report a stolen flower basket from her father's grave. A man in camouflage pants and a bright running shirt wondered aloud if cremation would allow him to be buried in two different places: "I don't want to get cut in half." Earlier in the week, another man came in and declared: "I died last year." He had a near-fatal heart attack and was declared dead for two minutes, prompting him to make his arrangements sooner than later.
These aren't conversations you'd hear at the bank, as Jones puts it. But he's happy to have them. He said there's really no telling how people react to death -- and there's a lot of avoiding. People tend to want to gloss over things and try to make death easier.
Then it actually ends up being harder, Jones said.
Much as he tries to dispel mysteries, there are some things Jones can't explain. A few weeks ago, Jones was quick to spot something unusual sitting near the Catholic shrine: A black ceramic urn with decorative gold flowers painted on the front.
He shook it. It felt heavy, like it held someone's ashes. It didn't have names or identification. He emailed the city's funeral directors and attached a photo, asking if they'd recently sold one like it. No one said they had. The mystery remains unsolved, the remains in the urn unclaimed, on track to be interred anonymously as a Pat Doe.
Jones said he'd never seen an urn abandoned like that. It was odd.
"That's kind of the weird thing about this place, you know," Jones said, staring at the urn on the table next to the candy bowl in his office. "We've been doing similar operations to this for 100 years, but you never know.
"Always something different."