I like cemeteries, I always have. They’re peaceful. But I don’t visit them to talk to dead people, and I’ve never in my life gone to one to commemorate a holiday.
I used to have this frazzled neighbor, Irene, who always had to take flowers to her grandmother’s grave: “I gotta get over to the cemetery tomorrow. Mom-Mom would miss me.” I’d think to myself, “Would Mom-Mom really miss you? If dead people still live on in some form, why would it matter where you remembered them?”
A lot of people believe this. My sister sends cell-phone photos from the cemetery to the rest of us, texting, “Mom and Dad wanted to know where the rest of you were.” (I think she thinks this will make us feel guilty. Nope. I seem to be missing the Catholic guilt gene.) I miss my parents, but I don’t need to drive to the western suburbs to look at where their bodies are buried. That seems sort of… morbid, especially when I can always talk to them right here.
Long ago, I decided that the Grave People (as I called them to myself) weren’t really Catholics who believed in the resurrection of life after death — they were members of an Etruscan burial cult. And all weekend, I watched from my kitchen window as people came with flowers to the small cemetery next to my house.
It seems strange to me. But it’s harmless, and brings people comfort, so what the hell.
I visit the graves of my relatives. Not necessarily because I believe they are there (although it is where the bones of my family lie), but because visiting the cemetery and praying for their lost love ones at the spot where there bones lay in the ground was so important to them. They also honored the memory of the dead by maintaining the graves, so that the world would see the people who beneath those headstones were loved and missed.
It was important to them, and I feel that I would dishonor their memory if their gravesites grew forlorn while their family was alive. So, I will probably go until I am too old and infirm or it becomes geographically unfeasible to go.
I plan on being cremated or donating my body to science. I have no need for anyone to visit my bones when I am gone, and if anyone can benefit from any of my parts after I no longer can, godspeed.
You mix your hard facts posts with astrology forecasts. Our hearts and our heads don’t always cast the same critical eye on all things. We all allow ourselves some inconsistent beliefs.
There seems to be an almost universal yearning to honor the dead, not always religion-based, generally by visiting either the spot where the death occurred or the bones of the dead are interred.
That being said, although I might ask my sister if she was going to have a chance to, say put wreaths on the headstones for Christmas, not to guilt her, but just because I don’t have to do it personally, so long as it is done, your sister’s word choice is judgmental, and unlikely to engender either the hoped-for response or any familial love . . . .