Dead right: It’s time to bury our tombstone obsession
"And a decent burial means a stone that is as good as other people’s. We keep up with the Joneses even in death."
Well, here’s a plan. No more tombstones. My first house backed onto one of the two graveyards in Lyttelton. Arthur the beekeeper ran a few sheep on it to keep the grass down. A couple of times I helped him with the muster, the two of us steering the mob between the graves and into a makeshift pen.
Once a dog ran amok in the graveyard and killed a sheep and Arthur shifted a broken block of stone on one of the grander tombs and dropped the corpse in the cavity. It stank for a few days, but few people noticed because few ever visited. And that is the point. The place was neglected. Most of us don’t go in for ancestor worship.
In the earthquakes 10 years ago tombstones fell by the hundred in the two Lyttelton graveyards. Almost all of them are still fallen. The council is understandably reluctant to spend money on the dead who don’t vote and so, it seems, are the dead’s descendants. Hardly any graves over 20 years old have been repaired.
It is instinctive and right to bury a body, returning it to the soil it rose from. It is also instinctive and right to mark the spot. But there is no need for monumental stone, for any number of reasons. And the first of these is that grief fades. We may imagine or pretend that it won’t, but it does. “Always in our memories”, say countless tombstones now lying on their backs in the Lyttelton graveyards, forgotten.
How much better it would be to mark every grave with a wooden memorial. It could be hugely elaborate if required, but made of untreated timber. When it rotted it could be replaced it with another even grander confection, and again and again, for as long as the mourner wished. But that wouldn’t be long. And then all could return to the soil.
Tombstones are a business. They trade on guilt. You cannot deny your relative a decent burial because that would seem cheap. And a decent burial means a stone that is as good as other people’s. We keep up with the Joneses even in death.
But the truth is that tombs are not for the dead, but for the living. You can see it in the wording on the stone. Much of it is consolatory euphemism, anything to soften the blunt finality of death. “Fell asleep
. . . at peace . . . at rest at last.” The point of sleep and rest is that you get up from both and go again. The point of death is you don’t.
There’s also a suggestion of envy in such words, the living being half in love with easeful death. “After life’s fitful fever,” said Macbeth of Duncan, whom he’d just killed, “he sleeps well.” Macbeth knows he’s killed his own peace of mind.
Then there’s the outright delusional. “Gone to a better place . . . in the arms of Jesus . . . not lost but gone before . . . with the angels”, and so on. All the product of human vanity. And there’s the nub of it. The permanence of stone reflects our belief that we are important in a way no other species is, that our lives and deaths have permanent significance and should be marked, that our essence is eternal. It’s our fondest and most dangerous delusion.
It’s an arrogance that blinds us to the damage we are doing and the threat not only to the natural world but to ourselves. Species go extinct. We are nothing special. Look at the great stone images on Easter Island. Where are their carvers now? Or look at the little brass plaque by a pair of benches in the old cemetery behind my former
house. It dedicates that spot to those who died in the flu epidemic of 1918 and were buried thereabouts in unmarked graves. Do we need reminding again that we are frail and vulnerable creatures, contingent on everything, undeserving of and
unsuited to perpetuity and permanence.
Keats knew all this, Keats the poet who suffered from consumption and coughed blood over his manuscripts. He went to Italy for the warmth, but it was no good. He died aged 25.
His grave lies in the Catholic cemetery in Rome beneath an epitaph that he wrote himself: “Here lies one whose name is writ in water.” It’s true of all of us. Only of course the words are carved in stone.