#265: Gravestones
On life, death, and existential moments
Walking through graveyards is something I have enjoyed doing for many years. Perhaps that’s not quite the right word, but I gravitate towards them because they are often so empty, and when parks become a rarity, graveyards are the go-to for finding some nature.
But when I walk through a graveyard, I can’t help but contemplate the lives memorialised by the hundreds of stone slabs surrounding me. Perhaps that’s the reason graveyards are often empty: they bring death to mind, and that’s not such a pleasant topic. Personally, I have a habit of contemplating death on a regular basis. I thought everyone was regularly crippled by existential moments, but I’ve started wondering whether it’s not quite so normal as I first thought.
My latest existential moment happened when I went wandering around a graveyard just a minute’s walk from my flat. I went because I needed to give my mind a breather from working at home — I ended up just giving my mind another deep, dark, and complicated concept to process.
Death has been a human fascination probably since the first human death. It’s one of life’s mysteries: what happens when life ends? Unlike my existential teenage years, I have a faith to draw on now. But faith is filled so much with doubt rather than certainty that this does not make me immune to existential fears. And when I walked through this graveyard, I became morbidly fascinated by the gravestones I walked by. I started thinking about them as objects — and whether they are more than that.
Why do we have gravestones? They act as a long-lasting physical marker of memory. But I can’t help but notice that these gravestones, some of which are less than a century old, already look worn. Some are no longer readable. Like the stolen objects I wrote about a few weeks back, I wonder: do unreadable gravestones continue to memorialise the lost? If they don’t, is that a bad thing? In the great, great, great expanse of time, many things will be lost to ‘present’ memory. But we seem to think that that means our past is lost too, that the things we did, the people we were, didn’t exist if they aren’t remembered by other people. That places a lot of responsibility on memory. Perhaps even an impossible amount.
But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t remember what we can. I’ve been watching the latest Good Fight season (if you haven’t watched it, you need to), and I remembered one of the scenes in a recent episode as I wandered this graveyard. The show focusses on a majority-black Chicago law firm, and in one tense scene a black employee comments on how all of the black partners can remember the names of black police brutality victims. The white partners can’t — but they do know the white victims’ names. Cue a later scene in which one of these white partners goes to the internet, and starts memorising the names of the black victims, one by one.
I remembered this scene because I was walking by a whole list of names, and I hadn’t read one of them. So when I thought of this scene, I started to do so. I walked through this graveyard and I tried to read every gravestone I walked by. It soon became overwhelming, and I started to gravitate to those more easily readable, or ones with interesting quotes on or intriguing names. Then I started calculating the length of people’s lives, how long one spouse lived after another. I tried to imagine these strangers’ lives, the vast time periods which separated me from them — and the not so vast. When does a gravestone become old and distanced, rather than new and harrowing?
But there also aren’t as many new gravestones as there are old, and I’ve noticed how there seems to be a growing trend for choosing cremation over burial. I presume this is because people’s spiritual centres, if they have any, are changing. Rather than being buried in the yard of a church they never attended, their ashes are kept on mantlepieces or scattered across the earth in some significant and beautiful location.
There’s also the fact that while gravestones may be solid, long-lasting objects of memory, objects which catch my attention, what’s buried beneath does not last. After saying I like graveyards, in the process of standing here, typing out the draft of this blog post on my phone, I have begun to feel disturbed. Rather than contemplating the gravestones, I’m remembering that there are many bodies buried beneath me, the remains of the lives these stones symbolise. I am caught between a place of awe and peace at human life, and horror at the mass of human life and death, and the anonymity of it all. My attempt to clear my head in the fresh air only brought me to another existential moment.
So how do I get out of it? I make myself stop typing, stop thinking. I close my eyes, I take a deep breath, and then I look up. I make myself listen to the life around me — the birds in the trees, the cars on the road, the breeze brushing my face. A crow caws, making me jump, but I start thinking about the living natural world around me, how graveyards can strangely become places of human death and natural life. The sun is shining, I am living today, and life is so much more than a memorial stone — I am so much more than my name on a grave, or my place in a memory. And I plan to be.
Katie writes regularly about random objects that she finds in her everyday life. If you’re interested in reading more, check out her blog Object, a collaboration with fellow Medium blogger Eleanor. You can also follow us on Twitter at@ObjectBlog.
