With each moment that she lingers in the tiny cemetery, the present world slips further away from Nanette Napoleon.

Around her, urban Honolulu buzzes with life on a warm summer morning: Groaning buses on King Street, the rattle of a nearby jackhammer and the laughter of preschool children. But amid the headstones in the Mission Cemetery, where the dead were first buried in 1823, Napoleon is whisked to the most comfortable place she knows.

"The city is all around us, but this is a little oasis," said Napoleon, who has studied Hawai'i's cemeteries for 35 years. "When I step into these cemeteries, I am in the 1800s and the rest of the world disappears for me. I feel like I am connected to them. I am not related to the people who are buried, but I feel a kinship to them. Besides their families, I am the only one who knows they are here."

This is the power — and beauty — of cemeteries, where epitaphs are carved invitations to history. From headstone art to burial customs, they offer sweeping statements on cultural identity that some find irresistible.

That rich milieu was the inspiration for "American Resting Place," a special exhibition of photographs, contemporary Hawai'i memorial art and funeral artifacts now on display at the Mission Houses Museum.

"For me, being a cemetery lady, this is a really important exhibition," Napoleon said. "This is the first time a broader view of cemeteries is being shown here."

The heart of the exhibition is a traveling collection of 50 beautiful black-and-white photographs by Reid Yalom. They were shot at cemeteries across the United States and included in "The American Resting Place" (Houghton Mifflin), a new book written by his mother, Marilyn Yalom.

Nineteen of Yalom's photographs were taken in Hawai'i.

The state's cemeteries proved to be so rich with detail that the author devoted a chapter to Hawai'i, and the publisher used photographs of the National Memorial of the Pacific at Punchbowl on the front and back of the book.

Beginning in 2005, the Yaloms visited 250 cemeteries during a three-year road trip across America — a fraction of the 250,000 nationwide. They visited the Islands twice.

What they found in Hawai'i underscored the frailty of cemeteries, said Marilyn Yalom, a cultural historian and senior scholar at Stanford University. This was felt most sharply on the Neighbor Islands, where some cemeteries have been abandoned.

On a Maui beach, the Yaloms found headstones from Japanese graves that had tumbled off an eroding cliff and into the surf below. The inscription on one read: "Beloved Mother." Sometimes, local residents find bones sticking out of the sand.

"This is the problem we have with cemeteries," Yalom said. "You think of them as so permanent and they disappear. There is vandalism. Things get stolen. Acid rain defaces inscriptions."

In Hana, they found graves nearly swallowed by foliage. When they returned a year later, they were surprised to see that someone was trying to uncover the graves.

"There is an ongoing process to recover things, but you are fighting nature," Yalom said. "It is not just in Hawai'i, but throughout the country. There is a preservation movement that has taken hold in the last 20 years. I get lots of e-mail from places where people are doing their best to restore cemeteries."

Cemeteries have long been familiar territory for Napoleon, who has visited both the most forgotten of cemeteries — she once found a skull on the same Maui beach visited by the Yaloms — and the most well-cared for as well. Through the decades, she has collected stories about the dead, headstone inscriptions and photographs of cemeteries throughout Hawai'i.

"There is so much in cemeteries," she said. "If you don't spend time in them, you don't realize it."

Napoleon hopes "American Resting Place" will cause people to view cemeteries the way she does, but it may take some doing. What was common a century ago might raise eyebrows in 2008.

For example, burial practices from 19th-century Hawai'i included taking hair from the deceased and braiding it into jewelry — some of which is on display in the exhibition — or taking photographs of the corpse and displaying them in the family's home. Native Hawaiians of the same period would often bash out their front teeth during mourning.

And no matter how pretty they are, cemeteries have a lot of baggage.

"People can't get beyond the death and dying aspect of graveyards," she said. "It's been my goal to get people to overcome that. They are about what the living brings to them."

To help convey that connection, Napoleon will lead a pair of cemetery tours this week, including a night visit in which she'll wear a 19th-century costume and guide visitors through a graveyard by lantern light.

Napoleon will be joined on the night tour by Elizabeth Nosek, senior curator for the museum.

"With this exhibit, we wanted to make it more real for the people who visited here, so they would see it up close and personal," Nosek said.

Visitors to the exhibition, which runs through Aug. 23, have been eager to share their feelings — a pleasant surprise, Nosek said.

"The discussions we have had with people have been phenomenal," she said. "They all have a story to tell. How their family was buried. How they plan to be buried."

But in the end, the dead have less need for cemeteries than those who survive them. Even though Napoleon wants her body cremated and her ashes scattered at sea, she told her son she also wants a monument. That way, people will have a place to visit and remember her life.

"There seems to be a universal human need to pay homage to someone, that their life needs to go on through a physical manifestation, such as a headstone," she said. "I think this is our way of keeping people alive in our memories."

RELATED EVENTS

For information on these events, call the Mission Houses Museum at 531-0481, ext. 707.