In my cultural background, when you go visit relatives, you go to visit the living ones and the dead ones. The living relatives are also supposed to make regular trips to visit the dead, clean the gravesite, weed around the headstones, have a chat, have a picnic, bring the kids. But in Australia, the council has paid gardeners and groundspeople who keep the cemetaries looking nice. They are often empty on weekends. People say cemetaries are ooky places, and some hold their breath driving past, almost as if death itself is contagious.
The living typically only show up under duress, and stand around silently in black on the muddy verge of the pit when the next grandparent/aunt/uncle dies. They get out of there as soon as possible.
At work, I was talking about going to visit my great-aunt in the cemetary in Poland. "Oh, that's morbid," one of the Steves said when it came up in conversation. "I hate cemetaries. They're depressing places."
It might be morbid in the sense of being to do with death, but it's not depressing. Cemetaries are lovely places.
Everyone buried in a cemetary had family or relatives who cared about them, who for whatever reason wanted to make sure that the deceased's body was given a spot, a reference point, a marker to say that they had lived. Everyone with an inscription had somebody who cared to write it. Everyone with an alabaster pot for flowers on their headstone had people who expected to come to drop off flowers. Everyone who had "beloved of" written on their stone had somebody who loved them.
Relationships in life are complicated things - there are whole professions to help us deal with them. We can love people and can't stand to be with them; we can be supported by our parents but feel freedom when they die; and family duty or financial obligation can make a mess of an otherwise straightforward relationship. Love and death are tied together through grief, which has a depressing physiological effect on us - our endocrine, immune, autonomic nervous and cardivoascular systems are all affected through mechanisms which are only starting to be understood. Live humans are walking bundles of contradictions, and a dead body is not. So the living are left with all those contradictory emotions from the relationship, and they have to digest them alone. The focal point for this transition is often at the cemetary watching the coffin getting lowered into the ground. Whether the grief has surfaced by this point is irrelevant - that is the last image of that person burned into the retina of the survivor.
So if you only show up to a cemetary when somebody you know and love has just died, you're not going to develop an easy and comfortable association with the place, huh.
In broader terms, cemetaries are fascinating places. Archaeologists are always excited about grave digs. They are particularly interesting because for a cemetary to exist, the society must be stable, prosperous, healthy, and emotionally interconnected enough to find a spot to mark the resting place of their dead.
What a privilege it is to bury your loved ones in a cemetary. To know where their bones are. To show your own kids and have a picnic there. To have a 3-high stack with 2 spaces left, and to ponder that this could well be a rare thing in human history, that people from all stratas of society (... poor in developing nations and modern slaves notwithstanding, but that post is still coming...) can plan where to put the corpses of their loved ones, ten, twenty, fifty years from now.
Please reconsider your local cemetary. Go check it out on a sunny weekend afternoon. Read the stones and think of all the care and love and joy and human connection that went into each one. It's actually a very happy place.
The living typically only show up under duress, and stand around silently in black on the muddy verge of the pit when the next grandparent/aunt/uncle dies. They get out of there as soon as possible.
At work, I was talking about going to visit my great-aunt in the cemetary in Poland. "Oh, that's morbid," one of the Steves said when it came up in conversation. "I hate cemetaries. They're depressing places."
It might be morbid in the sense of being to do with death, but it's not depressing. Cemetaries are lovely places.
Everyone buried in a cemetary had family or relatives who cared about them, who for whatever reason wanted to make sure that the deceased's body was given a spot, a reference point, a marker to say that they had lived. Everyone with an inscription had somebody who cared to write it. Everyone with an alabaster pot for flowers on their headstone had people who expected to come to drop off flowers. Everyone who had "beloved of" written on their stone had somebody who loved them.
Relationships in life are complicated things - there are whole professions to help us deal with them. We can love people and can't stand to be with them; we can be supported by our parents but feel freedom when they die; and family duty or financial obligation can make a mess of an otherwise straightforward relationship. Love and death are tied together through grief, which has a depressing physiological effect on us - our endocrine, immune, autonomic nervous and cardivoascular systems are all affected through mechanisms which are only starting to be understood. Live humans are walking bundles of contradictions, and a dead body is not. So the living are left with all those contradictory emotions from the relationship, and they have to digest them alone. The focal point for this transition is often at the cemetary watching the coffin getting lowered into the ground. Whether the grief has surfaced by this point is irrelevant - that is the last image of that person burned into the retina of the survivor.
So if you only show up to a cemetary when somebody you know and love has just died, you're not going to develop an easy and comfortable association with the place, huh.
In broader terms, cemetaries are fascinating places. Archaeologists are always excited about grave digs. They are particularly interesting because for a cemetary to exist, the society must be stable, prosperous, healthy, and emotionally interconnected enough to find a spot to mark the resting place of their dead.
- Cemetaries don't get populated in times of disaster or war - corpses usually get either a mass grave, or a spot on open earth or ocean to rot and get eaten by birds and eventually bleach and turn to dust.
- Cemetaries don't get populated in times of contagious disease - corpses get burned. Only in the 20th century did we really seal coffins adequately to routinely bury those dead from contagion.
- Cemetaries don't get populated by the extremely poor, or when food and money and energy are tight - when concentrating on survival, working 16 physical hours a day to subsist, or trying to keep alive your children who are too hungry to cry anymore, burying and marking the dead is a nicety that you can't afford.
- Socially disconnected individuals don't normally get put in cemetaries. Digging a grave by hand requires substantial effort. Paying for a spot in a graveyard, and marking it with a stone, are the acts of someone who cares for the dead person. If there is nobody to care enough about you to put you in a grave, you would end up on the heap with the paupers, or cremated.
What a privilege it is to bury your loved ones in a cemetary. To know where their bones are. To show your own kids and have a picnic there. To have a 3-high stack with 2 spaces left, and to ponder that this could well be a rare thing in human history, that people from all stratas of society (... poor in developing nations and modern slaves notwithstanding, but that post is still coming...) can plan where to put the corpses of their loved ones, ten, twenty, fifty years from now.
Please reconsider your local cemetary. Go check it out on a sunny weekend afternoon. Read the stones and think of all the care and love and joy and human connection that went into each one. It's actually a very happy place.
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