Graveyards

I have always had a fondness for graveyards. Growing up in England where every village had a church and beside the church would be a graveyard where those who had been baptized in the Christian faith were buried. From my avid teenage reading of Thomas Hardy I knew that children born out of wedlock or to pregnant unmarried women were not allowed to rest in consecrated ground. Graveyards are collections of the best names, the saddest stories, the hope for rest at the end of a tired life. Gravestones are often made large enough to carry the family as they die one by one. Bertha, the dearly missed wife of Henry, then Henry the loving husband and beloved father to Harry and Jemima. Then Harry and Jemima, much missed by their children Polly and Bertie. I am not good at counting. I am not going to grace my lack of skill by calling it maths. I count on my fingers. And in graveyards my fingers are busy working out old Martha was when she died in 1859. Or how many years baby Samuel had before he was spirited away with colic or TB. In New Zealand there were many born in Ireland or Scotland, who traveled the length of the world and would die in their adopted country.

In Glenorchy, the head of the Routeburn Track, the jumping on point for the River Dart a remote 50 miles from Queenstown the outdoor activity capital of the South Island, there is one general store. One hotel. Two cafes. A rugby pitch inside of a grass racetrack, a school, tractors in driveways. I went to Glenorchy in the Spring, but the hundred or so houses are set up for Winter snow with metal pitched roofs and double doors.

In the graveyard, there are about sixty or so headstones. Grouped in families. Most of them coming from Scotland, Dunfermline, Fife. Named Stuart or MacKenzie. Leaving a hard life for a hard life. Schoolteachers, miners, dying in their sixties. Explorers, adventurers, dying in the late twenties drowning in the Dart or tumbling down a mountain. Leaving behind their parents and sometimes their young families. In Britain the graveyards surround the old stone churches. To get into the church you walk though grass pathways inbetween the old headstones. The new ones are either in an area at one side or all now allocated to a place across the road somewhere. Which feels a little unsatisfactory. Like parking at Tesco’s when you have a card in your name at Harvey Nichols. The new stones are often smaller, made from a darker, more glossy stone. They will have potted plants in front of them. A chrysanthemum perhaps. Needing to be deadheaded. Or a bunch of silk flowers, beaten to colourless by the weather. In America families sometimes buy plots with room for a generation or two. I haven’t really looked at those. Maybe that kind of forward planning is too practical to hold any romance for me. I do remember a sweet woman from Central America who cleaned houses for a living whose sister died and she used all of the money that she was left to have her buried. I remember that not making any sense to me, but realizing in that moment, we spoke different languages. Graveyards show me the grip and the unraveling of small societies. Grandmas who lived into their nineties. Husbands who left widows to live on for decades past them. Wives, so much younger than their husbands, who clearly died in childbirth. Young men who left holes where support should have been. Children upon children who lived just long enough to be christened or managed to make it through a few sweet years before being called up to their maker. ( the words carved in stone, not mine.) The weather beaten stones, curved now at the edges, with their dedications and remembrances, dotted with moss and an occasional flower pushing up through the grass. Different to unmarked photograph albums that end up in antique shops, full of posed wedding shots, or young soldiers in uniforms, or young things sitting on the grass in tennis whites, or children in ill fitting clothes standing in doorways. But unclaimed in the same way. Maybe that is why I stop in graveyards and read the names and dates and dedications out loud. To put their names once more out in the air.