Transcript
Martha and I went to England, and we saw Stonehenge. And at the time we saw Stonehenge, we were told that it had been surrounded by various graves over the years, but it wasn't really a burial site.
Since then, scientists have discovered the remains of a huge house of the dead together with hundreds of burial mounds beneath the site itself. So, Stonehenge has had all sorts of different uses over the millennia, but it definitely involved housing the dead along the way.
Many of the ancient churches of England have bodies of famous or important people buried in the floors of the church or even the walls. But two of my favorite cemetery of design attributes are found commonly in these older churches in the UK. One of them is that the graves line the pathway to the church itself. And I just think that is such a great way to remember why you're at church, to pass through the cemetery to get to church and remember that you are going to die. The other attribute that I love about these places is that they are in neighborhoods and it's not creepy or haunting or anything like that. There aren’t really barriers between them and the surrounding neighborhood except for typically a wall, but it is a reminder of mortality, but maybe more importantly a reminder that their ancestors and their families surround them and are nearby, and that they have a great history in the place.
Ireland, the Irish - my ancestors, they know how to think about death and it’s said that they do that a lot. Some people claim that the funeral is the central social ritual for the Irish, more important than burials and baptisms. I don't know whether that's true, but when Martha and I visited Newgrange, it was built around 3200 BC, before Stonehenge, before the Great Pyramids. And it was constructed by pre-Celtic people as a passage leading to the next experience beyond this. And it's not even the oldest of the burial sites they’ve found in Ireland. Even on the younger side, I mean the burial site at the Hill of Tara is 5,000 years old, and that became the seat of The High Kings of Ireland.
And then along the coast, we visited a cemetery that wasn't quite as ancient as these but it housed the remains of Romans who’d come to study at the schools of Aran. So, even the merely old cemeteries in Ireland are ancient by American standards. The visitor center at the Hill of Tara uses that favorite format of mine--the walk through the cemetery on the way to church -and I love these tombstones. I love the way the lichen and moss gather on them. It's so peaceful.
And it's interesting over the years, in different cultures, graveyards have been used as parks. People would have cemeteries that were places they would go for picnics and the relationship with the dead was not so separate, was not an arrival of such solemn mournfulness to visit any cemetery over time. What's amazing to me is that the way the past and the present are connected through these graveyards. Ancient burials may occur right next to modern ones, and inside a framework, a setting of ancient human occupation.
Not all the cemeteries are still favored. Martha and I attended a wonderful music session in a church that had become a town community center. The locals laughed at us because we paid money to go to this musical performance. They said, “Why don't you just go to the bar as you'll see all of those people playing in different bars tonight?” I think they had maybe a more expansive idea of how much time we were willing to spend in bars and maybe how late we would be in those bars to hear all of these musicians that we get to hear in this one setting.
But when we were waiting to go into the community center, we wandered around their cemetery and it was overgrown with broken gravestones, time had worn away all the names on them. And even though it was inside of a neighborhood, as you can see from the houses in the background, and maybe because it wasn't the tourist destination it, and because the church was gone, there weren't the same economies for care.
But it was kind of sad, and it made you wonder whether these graves represented families that were completely gone from the community. In other contexts, the churches would be plainly long gone, but the cemetery was still being used and was beautiful. Maybe families in the countryside have deeper roots and continue to use and maintain their traditional family plots.
I don't know. It's curious.
In a coastal cemetery, the interactions were obviously fresh - a fragment of a note expressing regret that they had not been able to say goodbye. It was there near burial sites that were quite ancient and next to the ruins of a church, which plainly had not been there, and for a very long time. This grave, obviously still in the mind of some living relative, gave a little clue. The tombstone informs you that its original occupant, John, was buried in 1929 at the age of 52 and then joined by his wife in 1968. She was 82. Their daughter Delia was interred in 1977 at 60, and their grandson Michael was buried when he was 51 in 2004.
So, one of the reasons this ancient land isn't covered by cemeteries is the multiple use of grave sites. If I were going to pick a place in Ireland to be buried, I think this would be it, right at the water's edge in a field of tall grasses. It's a little lonely. The wind blows fiercely. You can imagine great storms beating on the place, but to me, it's beautiful - rough, unmanicured, but obviously not forgotten. And in such a place of beauty, the salt and the sand have blasted away all names, all dates, every trace of identity there. If I imagine death as a peaceful sleep, here would be the place. If I thought that one was going to linger in a place after death, this would be the place.
The Irish don't necessarily relish going out peacefully, keening this notion of an intense mournful wailing was still done after funerals well into the 20th century. The Irish used to do wakes as a celebration of life to honor the deceased and also to check and make sure that they were really dead.
True wakes aren't really common anymore. The church discouraged them because apparently, they became pretty body affairs, as the sort of embrace of life in the face of death caused people to think about living life to its fullest and in ways that weren't necessarily approved of by the church.
Americans have celebrations of life. They're pretty sober and vanilla affairs most of the time. Food is shared. There may be a little drink, condolences given and seldom seen relatives and friends catch up with one another. But I've only been to one that felt like perhaps a real wake without the body side. After we buried my Uncle Charles, we gathered in a room inside the small house that he and my aunt had built, and they were mostly men in the room - Charles’ brother, his nephews, and friends. My Aunt Alice brought in some beer and some snacks, but then she retreated to the kitchen with the other women. And these stories of Charles were told, and they were loud, grand, and funny stories, and Charles’ brother actually resembled him enough to it lent, a sort of pleasant presence to this assembly maybe the best way.
So, I'm going to stop part 1 here. I hope that you'll continue on with part 2.
We'll finish up in Ireland with an unusual cemetery, full of horned and fanged creatures and then head off to the United States.
Thank you for joining us at Dan's Tiki Bar.
I'm Dan Slone, and this has been Bits & Peaces.
Thanks a lot. Take care.
Comments