The visceral pull of a final resting place

I’VE always been something of a ‘tombstone tourist’. That’s the rather snappy label I happened upon this week and which actually describes perfectly my predilection for wandering around graveyards when I am in another country.

Sometimes I’m there to seek out the final resting place of someone who has made their mark on the world – James Joyce in Fluntern cemetery in Zurich, Edith Piaf and Oscar Wilde in Père Lachaise in Paris, Joseph Brodsky in San Michele in Venice. That kind of thing.

At other times I just like to visit the local graveyard, especially in a town which, although far from home, is still one I know well. One such spot is the small graveyard in Paleochora in southwest Crete where I love to wander alone, scanning the photographs set into the white-marble headstones and recognising so many faces from the past, people who were part and parcel of the fabric of this lovely little town over the 30-odd years that I have been coming to stay here. Strangely, however, despite my love of graveyards the world over I never really understood ‘ordinary’ grave visiting. Oh, my mother would regularly drag me with her to the cemetery in Coleraine where my grandparents are buried whenever I was visiting. And thus would begin the ritual. Every leaf that had had the audacity to land on the white marble stones on John and Jeannie Dean’s grave would have to be removed; flowers would be replaced; the black marble headstone and surround would be wiped down and then, for good measure, out would come the yellow duster and the Mr Sheen for the final polishing flourish.

That I didn’t ‘get’ the cleaning and polishing ritual was fair enough, but nor did I really ‘get’ my mother’s need to visit her parents’ resting place so much.

As recently as six years ago I still didn’t understand the visceral, emotional pull of a grave. So I’d stand at my grandparents’ grave and I’d remember them with great fondness. And then I’d leave. It wouldn’t have bothered me to know that I wouldn’t stand there again for another year or even – dare I say it – ever.

That’s how I felt then. So the idea that you could breach important rules to visit a grave would have been beyond my comprehension. That in a lockdown you would be allowed to drive beyond the 5km travel limit to visit a grave? Bonkers, I would have thought.

But that was before I lost my husband, my father, and my mother.

On my two trips back to home territory this year – in March, just before lockdown, and again in August – I surprised myself by driving straight to the cemetery when I arrived. And while standing there, staring at my parents’ names and letting the memories wash over me, I felt it: that visceral, emotional pull. That need to be there – in the place where I watched my father and my mother being lowered into the earth. Just to stand at the grave, to feel their presence and wrap myself, however fleetingly, in the comfort of that.

With my husband it’s different, and yet the same. I have a deep-rooted need to be where his ashes were scattered. To stand there, in that place where he, like my parents, finally became elemental. Earth for my parents in the deep Derry clay; water for my husband in the aqueous depths of a Venetian canal.

So will I be ‘breaking’ the 5km rule to drive the 300km to Coleraine? No, I won’t. But I’ll be there in December. Will I be flying to Venice to stand on the edge of a small side-canal near the Accademia Bridge? No, because I was there on a quick turnaround visit last month, my two-week isolation on my return well worth the soothing balm that visit offered to my soul.

Graves are important. So for those who have suffered terrible loss – especially the recently bereaved – surely it doesn’t really matter if they take the occasional drive beyond the pandemic limits in order to stand at a grave and weep, or smile, or simply remember.