The Very Last Place We Go
Perhaps the design of cemeteries is yet another way to exercise some control over the one thing in life that is inevitable.
Welcome to the third issue of Place! It’s been yet another week in lockdown, and it feels like the world is further tearing at the seams. Though we’re slowly regaining the freedom to move outside our homes, the same challenges and inequities over who gets to exist in what space are as prevalent as ever. Today we’re exploring the design of cemeteries, questioning the places we have demarcated for the living and the dead, and when those lines blur, maybe even by accident. In our obsession with manicuring places of the dead, are we also attempting to exert as much control as possible over this “next space” in our lives? What makes a good memorial and how do we honor those who have passed on while living ourselves?
At Place, we believe that the experiences, sensations and conversations we have as we move about the world stay with us, stacking up as the years go by, forming who we are and the way we view the world. Do you have a letter you want to share? Send it to us at placeletter@protonmail.com. If you are interested in writing for Place you can find our inaugural pitch guide here. And be sure to follow us on Instagram @placenewsletter for a daily visual feast. Yours, The Place editorial team
They say that funerals are more for the living than the dead, a place to collectively celebrate and mourn a life lost. I associate funerals with journeys. I still remember the long somber ride I took from Brooklyn to Long Island to bury my grandpa, sitting in the back of a limousine halted in a traffic jam, regretting the multiple glasses of lemonade I drank at the wake. I remember the setting as bucolic and peaceful, though seemingly empty besides our coterie of mourners. I was glad his grave was nestled next to my Nana’s, near a sturdy oak tree that looked like it would blanket the ground in golden leaves in the autumn.
But my visits to New York since have been fleeting and I haven’t visited his grave since that day in 2011. Though I wonder, if I did go, what would I do? Touch the gravestone? Say a prayer? These gestures seem too simple for a man who took up country western dancing in his 70s, crafted intensely detailed ships in a bottle and crooned mid-century pop hits in his thick Brooklyn accent. The life he lived seemed bigger than any burial plot could hold. But then again, he lived his entire life in a crowded city. Perhaps he just wanted a bit of peace and quiet.
Other cemeteries I saw in the US, usually at a distance from the highway, were similarly manicured. A 20th century design trend rebranded cemeteries as “memorial parks” -- such as the one my grandpa was buried in -- that sought to soften the experience of death, replacing upright tombstones with bronze plaques that lay flat on the ground to blend in with the pastoral landscape: a cemetery that looks like a park, as long as you don’t get too close.
While the aim was to create a beautiful place to reflect on happy memories, the stark imagery can also be distancing, Keith Eggener, the author of “Cemeteries” told The Atlantic.
“You don't go out to the memorial park very often,” he said. “It's seen as an American phenomenon. We send our old people off to homes and hospitals to die; we only go to the cemetery for funerals and then avoid them.”
I saw cemeteries as the amen after the prayer or the last plastic cup thrown away at the end of the party; the physical manifestation of closure. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, very expensive coffin into ground.
But then I found myself in a place where the veil between the living and the dead seemed lifted — where the space between these realms crumbled, overgrown with vines.
The Abney Park Cemetery off Stoke Newington Church Street in London is hardly the most enticing attraction on the lively high street dotted with cozy cafes, inviting pubs and aspirational houseware stores. It’s set back from the street, behind a cement wall and a tall iron fence, only a few tombstones and swaying trees visible. Besides the opening hours posted on a park sign outside, I wouldn’t have thought of it as a place for the public to stroll.
One day, on a Saturday morning walk, I decided to step in. The first few rows of tombstones, mostly dating back to the turn of the century, are crowded and wobbly, like the bottom row of teeth before braces. The once finely carved stone angels and epitaphs are faded from a century of England’s notoriously wet and windy weather. Dirt and stone paths branch out into what seems more overgrown forest than graveyard – the tightly packed graves are blanketed by ferns, headstones cracked below fallen tree branches, granite crosses wrapped in vines.
As I walked further into the labyrinthine cemetery, I expected to have the eerie chill from being in the resting place of hundreds of Londoners dating back to the 19th century. The Goosebumps books of my youth made it quite clear that if you hang out around the dead long enough, you’re going to come out with a ghost story or two. But the sun cheerily shone through the leaves, dogs with lolling tongues trotted ahead of their owners and kids played outside an abandoned church tucked in a clearing in the center of the park.
I realized it was the first cemetery I had been to that was built for the living, not just the mourning. Where the present could hang out with the past, not just quietly lay flowers at a grave.
The roots of Abney Park actually trace back to early 1800s and the construction of Cimetière du Père Lachaise in Paris. At the turn of the 19th century, Paris’ church burial grounds were filling up with bodies and city officials were concerned the crowding would lead to the spread of disease. In 1804 Napoleon Bonaparte commissioned architect Alexandre-Théodore Brongniart to design a cemetery in the northeast outskirts of the city that would not only provide additional space for the dead but entice the living. Brongiart filled the 110 acres of a former Jesuit country retreat with winding brick walkways and tree lined avenues, an unprecedented elegance in burial grounds. City officials relocated the remains of famous Parisians to the new cemetery in order to drum up attention.
Soon, burials in Père Lachaise gained prestige. Famous architects and artists were commissioned to design ornate markers and mausoleums, sculpting weeping widows, coiled serpents and overturned hourglasses. Today one can say prayer to Euterpe (the muse of music) whose stone likeness bends over the grave of Chopin, leave a lipstick kiss on the Jacob Epstein-sculpted sphinx at Oscar Wilde’s tomb, or marvel at the bronze bust of Balzac, who wrote scenes at Père Lachaise into his novels. It is now an integral part of Paris’ cityscape.
By the mid 19th century, London was facing a similar problem, and a cholera outbreak exacerbated the public health need for safer burials outside the crowded city. After Brits returning from abroad spoke of the civic success of Père Lachaise, Parliament passed a bill in 1832 to encourage the development of private cemeteries.
Over the next decade seven sprawling graveyards were established outside Central London. Dubbed the “Magnificent Seven,” these included Highgate Cemetery, where Karl Marx is buried (entry, ironically, costs 4 quid) and Kensal Green Cemetery, where one can visit the grave of Lady Byron.
Abney Park Cemetery was established in 1840 as the first arboretum-cum-graveyard, boasting 2,500 varieties of plants and an alphabetized ring of trees planted around the perimeter. It was also the first non-denominational cemetery in Europe: The cemetery had been formed on the land of non-conformist hymn writer Isaac Watts and gained a reputation as the final home for dissenters. An estimated 200,000 people are buried there, including William Booth, the founder of the Salvation Army.
While Père Lachaise is still the pristine and elegant park that its designers intended, the Magnificent Seven have taken a slightly different path. Today Abney Park isn’t overgrown for poetic reasons, but rather financial. The company that managed the cemetery went into administration in the 1970s, and nature took over. London acquiesced. The thoughtfully planned arboretum grew into a biodiverse woodland, a now protected urban home for deadwood invertebrates and fungi. Hence the cracked and ivy-covered gravestones I was surprised to see.
Perhaps the design of cemeteries - neat or overgrown - and my attempt to make meaning from them is yet another way to exercise some control over the one thing in life that is inevitable. Is there a better way to experience death, that honours both those who have passed and the people they have left behind?
There are certainly more difficult ways that have felt exceptionally apparent in recent months. The cost of the average funeral in the US has risen to $7,360, well out of reach for the 40% of Americans who can’t afford an emergency expense over $400. The current pandemic has demanded lives at such a pace that images of mass graves have circulated in Brazil, Iran and the US in recent weeks. Those murdered at the hands of the powerful, such as George Floyd whose death in police custody sparked protests and riots in Minneapolis, end up first memorialized in hashtags and protest signs.
It’s a reminder that it’s a privilege to have control over our final resting place once we depart; to choose one where the living can visit, touch a gravestone, or say a prayer, as simple these gestures may be.
Walking in Abney Park, I somehow feel more connected to those whose remains lay buried in the ground — here, the leafy branches of gnarled old horse chestnut, hornbeam and ash trees, many planted well over a century ago, provide a green canopy and swishing symphony that drowns out the city beyond the walls. The crumbling, vine-covered tombstones invite me to read the epitaphs, to come closer to the lives of the dead, as I wondered what it was like when the occupant “fell asleep.”
The disarray, while less reverent than the quiet lawns of modern memorial parks, is inviting. It’s appropriate to jog, shout, read, breathe, think, and mourn (and do other things – long known to be a cruising hotspot, there have been efforts to end the practice in recent years - though artist Louis Buckley pointed out there’s an irony that “the fecundity of nature is celebrated while human sexual activity is frowned upon”). Life is messy, and here grief and death can be too.
The other day I stumbled upon a marble lion, forever snoozing on the tomb of Frank C. Bostock, a circus owner who tamed big cats but eventually succumbed to the flu. The verdant and flowering scene that surrounds it seems to say: See? Here, life remains. Ashes to greenery. Dust, to fresh soil.
- Karis Hustad is a journalist based in London, UK. She’s covered tech, finance and politics from the US, India, Morocco, Denmark, Sweden, the UK and the Netherlands.
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