Graveyard Stories
The Guardian recently had an article in the stories contained in cemeteries. Headstones hold clues — the short time between dates (what happened to them?) or the long time between dates (how did they feel outliving all of the relatives buried around them?). Inscriptions, headstone shape, flowers left behind: they’re all clues.
Are we losing something as so many move to be cremated? I will be. (Or, in any case, I will not be buried.) The people who scatter my ashes will remember the spot where they left them, and they may even tell the next generation. But future people will not know I existed in the way that I’m aware of all of the people who existed when I walk through a graveyard.
It’s not enough to get me to change my funeral plans. And I know there are many more ways to make an impact than a stone with your name on it. But it got me thinking about how it will be rare to see modern dates on headstones one day. Or how I sometimes go to cemeteries when we’re traveling to see a grave. How that is lost when we move from one tradition to another.
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A significant part of my research involves ancient funerary epigraphy (tombstones). It’s one of my favourite things to teach because it lets us get away from the elite perspective of the literary sources. It’s fascinating to see the interplay of convention and the desire on the part of the commemorator to portray the deceased as an individual. So I do like to think about what historians will say about contemporary tombstones, two thousand years hence.
My grave already exists, as I will be buried with my husband. I don’t know how they do the tombstones for the later arrivals. I do know that my husband’s had to be redone (and is still not entirely accurate, but they can’t fit all his deployments on there) because they initally got his rank wrong.
We have 2 graveyards behind our house. One is 1800s era and the other still gets some use today.
As a genealogist, this worries me too. I get a LOT of information from tombstones!
That said, even if you want to be cremated, scattering is not the only option for your ashes. You can have them put in a container (and it doesn’t have to be an expensive urn) — and it doesn’t have to sit on the mantelpiece. They can be buried in a cemetery with a marker, or interred in a columbarium wall niche with a plaque, which is what we did with Katie’s ashes, and will do with our own. It’s obviously not as cheap as scattering, but still much less expensive than a full burial plot. Two of dh’s aunts passed away, and their caskets were interred in a wall in a huge mausoleum building in north Toronto, which I gather is a very European thing to do (VERY expensive too!)… but there were walls for cremation urns too. Some of them were glass display cases, where not only was the urn on display but photos, flowers and meaningful objects (figurines, rosaries, etc.). I thought that was kind of cool — much more personalized.
You can also scatter some ashes and put some in a container. My grandfather asked to be cremated and his ashes scattered at the site of the farm where he grew up. My grandmother was not comfortable with this, so to appease her, we wound up scattering some and had the rest kept at the local funeral home until she passed, and then put the container in her casket and buried it with her in her family’s plot. There was only one vacant plot left there, so it worked out perfectly. The marker is for both of them.
I’ve always found cemeteries fascinating, even before I got interested in genealogy. I used to ride my bike to the cemetery by myself when I was a kid living in a small town and wander around looking at the names & dates. It never creeped me out. Our apartment for the first five years we were married was just around the corner from Toronto’s largest cemetery. It’s like a park — huge old trees, lots of people walking and jogging and rollerblading there. Some of Toronto’s/Canada’s wealthiest old families are buried there (the Masseys, the Eatons, the Westons), some in huge mausoleums that are as big as a house.
Beyond names and dates, etc., I love reading some of the inscriptions on cemetery markers. There’s one near a family plot in a cemetery in Winnipeg for a woman who died relatively young. It says “She did her work so well in the morning/God let her off in the afternoon.” The niche marker just above where dh & I will be someday has a stanza from Pink Floyd’s “Time”: “The time is gone, the song is over, thought I’d something more to say.” 😉 I said to dh that we could do a lot worse than spending eternity in proximity to Pink Floyd lyrics, lol. 😉