Many of these are practical. For starters, a cemetery contains a wealth of historical data not easily acquired else. Just the demographics are a treasure. Where did past inhabitants come from? What religions did they practice? What organisations did they belong to, and what was their mission? What light does this shed on the present community? What have we lost? What gained?
In a cemetery you're surrounded by the final statements of multiple generations, reflecting successive changes in values and perspectives. Whenever I move house, one of my first outings is the nearest graveyard. An hour or so and I've got an earthier, more visceral understanding of where I am, more tactile, if not easily quantified, than the one I'll get from the local history books I'll study next.
Burial grounds encode a lot of culture, and if you're paying attention, the whole site, properly examined, amounts to a book in itself.
Then there's the simple peace of the place – the leafy green, the tranquil refuge from the fretting living. I've often botanised and foraged in cemeteries, as being mostly uncrushed by the pounding fist of development, and am especially fond of them as a mushrooming venue.
And of course, there's the sacredness of remains, an instinctive, non-religious kind of consecration we've never fully replicated. (Some cultures – First Nations, Catholic-majority societies, traditionally Buddhist peoples, Celtic homelands – find similar awe in sites that don't contain reliquaries, but industrial values have undermined even their ability to transmit such reverence to recent generations.)
Institutional Zen, in its Confucian attachment to human authority, practices a heretical adulation of the dead – disturbingly, even of pieces there-of – and while I'm reflexively uneasy with this, I do wholeheartedly embrace the sangha of the past as an indispensible source of companionship and insight. Their presence is felt strongly in cemeteries.
Still – speaking of irony – no-one on either side of my family has been interred for 70 years, making us yet another cause of death to the dead. The usual suspects are afield: the extreme expense of burial, for the most part, but also a callow, pseudo-logical insistence that we've no need of graves to honour and remember our loved ones.
Which is, of course, tripe. I would in fact greatly cherish a grave where I could visit my parents and grandparents, and the dear regretted friends now leaving this world at ever-greater rate despite my pleading insistence they reconsider.
No, the nondescript region where we will scatter my mother's ashes will not replace her grave: that specific plot of ground where what's left of her articulated body would drift toward new and different existences under a solid square of stone that I can see and touch.
Not even almost.
And as I myself will also receive no such treatment, I must eventually commit the same sin of cenotaphery, and drive yet another nail into the coffin of, well, coffins.
Not that I'd impose a traditional burial on my survivors, of course. I get it; things have changed. And although I accept that as a Zenner, I do much regret my headstone. Because I've got the most awesome epitaph ever:
"Nothing is carved in stone."
How happy I'd lie below such a koan.
Good hunting to all of us on this, the annual Druid crusade to keep the dead dead.
(Photo of Tomnahurich, my favourite graveyard to date, courtesy of Derek Brown and Wikimedia Commons.)
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