"’May eternal damnation be upon those in Whaling Port who, without knowing me, have maliciously vilified me. May the curse of God be upon them and theirs.’

While the curse sounds like something out of the Old Testament, the words were written on Mary Dolencie's stone in the 1980s. And while ‘Whaling Port’ evokes images of Moby Dick's New Bedford, it actually refers to a housing association located near the Ancient Cemetery.

‘She did it out of spite,’ Ted Barnicoat of T.R. Barnicoat Monuments in South Yarmouth said. His father, the late David Barnicoat, carved the inscription into Dolencie's headstone.

‘She apparently thought that the entire neighborhood was against her,’ said Barnicoat, recalling stories his father told him. Barnicoat said that Dolencie, who lived alone, was known as an eccentric character and rubbed some neighbors the wrong way. The Times couldn't locate anyone living in the Whaling Port neighborhood today who remembers meeting Dolencie, but they've certainly heard stories about her over the years.

Some said Dolencie (1906-1985) hosted too many cats, which rankled the neighbors; others claim it was her penchant for feeding pigeons…

Dolencie left the bulk of her estate to the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, according to local newspaper accounts from mid-1980s. Reports indicate that the MSPCA was displeased with the curse, and there was an unsuccessful effort to block the gravestone from going into the ground…

Cape Cod cemetery expert Robert Paine Carlson said Dolencie's mean-spirited last words are unusual. ‘I don't know of any other vitriolic ones like this,’ Carlson said. ‘It may be a forerunner of what's to come when people start to feel like they have more freedom about what they write on an epitaph.’”

— Jacob Konos, The Cap Cod Times, 27 Oct 2013

Grace Waronker does an Instagram account about cemeteries, and I first encountered Mary Dolencie there. Dolencie is my kind of woman: the neighbors thought she had too many cats and she thought they should go to hell. And she’s saying it from her grave. It’s very, as they say, gangster.