This one is just too disjointed. Little snippets from Dick’s life. It would seem he had some mental health issues, although a lot of that might be explained by what looks like some pretty serious meth use. I’m guessing the combo is pretty potent. On the plus, Dick just wrote a bunch of weird sci-fi (and, okay, engaged in some domestic abuse) as opposed to creating a…let’s call it a “reich.”
I think the book tried to cover too much, and it just didn’t have the space.
I visited Philip K Dick’s grave years ago. It was the first time I had a car that could make it a few hours, so I went for it. Okay, full disclosure, it was my brother’s car. I did a rubbing of the grave and put it in a ZINE! I made a zine. Maybe two issues. The only reader of which was ALSO my brother.
PKD is buried in Fort Morgan, Colorado, next to his twin sister, who died in infancy. She was buried there early on, 5 or 6 weeks after her birth, and they share a headstone.
This is where I’m having trouble putting things together. Should we try and solve a mystery!? Why are Philip and his twin, Jane, buried side-by-side in Fort Morgan CO, marked with a headstone with a cat on it?
In the book, it’s explained that the twins were unhealthy, and by the time they got them to the hospital, Jane had died. However, in the book it appears they were at home when this happened. The likelihood that Jane would end up buried in Colorado seems low if events occurred as they appeared in the book. But it’s a reasonable fudge of the truth. It’s not really critical to know that this happened in the middle of cross-country travels, and the book doesn’t SPECIFICALLY say the Dicks were at home when all of this went down. Just seems unlikely, right?
Philip’s Wikipedia page says that the twins were born 6 weeks premature. It doesn’t mention their location.
According to a web page for a Philip K. Dick festival held in Fort Morgan, Jane died when the Dick parents were headed cross-country. Philip’s sister, Jane, died on the way, in approximately Fort Morgan(?)
The Dicks would have been traveling from Chicago to San Francisco around early 1929, WAY before the interstate system existed, so I was curious whether this still worked out. It does! According to an old-ass map I found, it seems very plausible that if someone was driving from Chicago to San Francisco at that time, they’d pass through Fort Morgan.
Another account says the Dicks were driving cross-country when the twins were born, and as a result they stayed a few weeks in Fort Morgan.
The books DOES say that both twins were unhealthy, which may have something to do with why they purchased a headstone to bury them side by side. Perhaps the Dick parents expected Philip to pass as well.
However, another article on a potentially disreputable web site (noted by the lime green text on dark background usually favored by UFO watch and white power websites) the Dick parents were from Colorado, dad from Cedarwood, mom from Greeley, and Fort Morgan was a “compromise site.” Mom IS from Greeley (hometown hero!), but I’m not sure how Fort Morgan is a compromise site between the two parts of CO. Fort Morgan and Cedarwood are almost directly north/south of each other, and Fort Morgan is east of Greeley, WAY closer to Greeley and nowhere near Cedarwood, really. It’s not in between the two, so a “compromise” location of Fort Morgan is very confusing, and I’m not buying that.
So, after looking like 10 different places, it would appear: The Dicks were headed from Chicago to San Francisco for Dick’s dad to get a job. I would guess, based on some maps from the era, that they could make the trip inside of a week. The Dick twins were born 6 weeks premature, so that might explain why the Dicks were caught on the road in a small town on the eastern plains of Colorado. If both twins were premature and sick, this being 1928, it might have made sense for the parents to expect, after Jane’s passing, that Philip wouldn’t make it, so they made a nice headstone for both babies.
Some Find a Grave research showed that Philip’s father and grandparents are in the Fort Morgan cemetery. Which means:
Jane was buried there in 1929.
Grandma Bessie was buried there in 1949.
Grandpa William was buried there in 1954.
Philip was buried there in 1982.
So was it only chance that Jane was buried there?
…it’s also possible that Edgar, PKD’s dad, had parents in the Fort Morgan area. Both of his parents are buried in Fort Morgan as well. However, I didn’t find any info on this. So it’s possible that the Dicks passed through Fort Morgan by chance, and it’s also possible they were headed that way anyway to stop with Edgar’s parents.
Philip’s remains were taken to the grave site by his father, who died a few years after Philip and is buried in Fort Morgan as well.
This leaves two mysteries:
1. Is the current tombstone original, or was it changed in the decades after Jane’s death?
2. What’s the deal with the wildcat symbol?
Mystery 1:
According to a picture caption in The Sun, the tombstone is probably original (though I can’t say that definitively). I was curious about whether a tombstone of this type would likely come from the 30’s, so I also looked through headstones in the Fort Morgan cemetery on Find A Grave from around 1930, and I found at least 2, Georgia Lee Adams and George W Akers (may they rest in peace) that do have some similarities in appearance. So it’s possible that there have been restorations of all three around a similar time, but it’s also plausible that these three are as originally created. However, Edgar Dick, Philip’s dad, who’s also buried in Fort Morgan, has a dog on his stone, and it looks very similar. Edgar having died a few years after Philip…unless he had his stone made in the same style?
According to the aforementioned disreputable neon site, Edgar, Philip’s dad, made the tombstone and wanted the twins reunited in death. There’s something to this theory as Dick was supposedly haunted by a gravestone with his name on it somewhere out there in the world. So maybe it wasn’t something he was pumped about, and therefore wouldn’t have altered or really dealt with.
Mystery 2:
I didn’t find a lot about the symbolism of cats on tombstones. Some say it’s a symbol of resurrection, cats having 9 lives. I did wonder whether the cat was a later addition. Dick wrote books that did have concerns with animals, including Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep in which pets are a beloved status symbol, and a book called Nick and the Glimmung, a children’s book where a cat plays a key role. Dick was also known to like cats.
The problems with Mysteries 1 and 2 is that they lead me to different conclusions. Mystery 1 makes it seem like maybe a cat was always on the grave. Mystery 2 made it seem like it was a later addition with Dick’s growing into adulthood.
Maybe there needs to be an email to a historical society. This is my Golden State Killer moment.
*************************UPDATE********************
I decided to go ahead and see what I could dig up. Pardon the graveyard pun.
I emailed the director of museums and libraries in Fort Morgan, who asked two experts: a PKD literary expert and the cemetery superintendant. Here’s what I got:
Cemetery Superintendant:
so the stone at Philip’s gravesite was placed after he passed away… until then there was only a temporary marker for his baby sister, a very common marker to be left in our Cemeteries. Regarding the cat… the family members I have talked to have told me it is as simple as Philip was a cat lover. His love for the feline species is fairly well documented. I know there is no significance to a cat as it relates to their birthday or the fact that they were twins, so I feel comfortable rolling with that rationale.
PKD Expert:
PKD loved cats. His and Tessa’s cat Pinky (diminutive of Pinkerton as Tessa told me and nothing to do with any ‘pink beam’) figures, however, in Phil’s 1974 pink-beam events. In my Index to THE SELECTED LETTERS OF PHILIP K. DICK: 1974 there are 23 references to Pinky in Phil’s letters that year. He actually died and returned to Phil in one of his strange dreams to say farewell. He writes movingly of it in these letters.
The pink beam events refer to hallucinations/visions that PKD experienced during his lifetime.
So there we have it. There was A stone there, but not the current stone. Which explains the cat as well as the dog on Edgar’s grave.
I’m prepared to call it case closed here. Thanks to Chandra McCoy: Library/Museum Director for the City of Fort Morgan!