Open Writing

“I see they’re barbecuing today,” remarked the schoolboy irreverently yet solemnly as we all noticed the white smoke rise from the crematorium’s furnace chimney. We were gathered under the bus shelter which adjoins the cemetery, trying to seek shelter from the burning sun whilst we waited for our public transport. Schoolboys are not known for their political correctness but, like the rest of us whose homes and school border on the bushland cemetery, he had become somewhat familiar with the procedures of death to the point where they no longer shocked or upset him.

It is not that we locals are immune to people’s sensibilities or uncaring towards the grief of others. On the contrary, we have been so enveloped in the details of each and every loss that we can stroll through the memorial gardens, or between the headstones, reciting and reliving each departure in detail. Here is Thomas buried with his two children, all of whom were killed in a car crash with a drunken driver on Good Friday. They died instantly. It is his surviving, injured wife who has suffered ever since.

Nearby is Jessica’s grave. She was only fifteen when she was crushed by the hysterical crowd at a pop concert. Her grieving mother has created a shrine of trinkets as a remembrance to her. Her father visits separately and drowns his misery with beers. He leaves the bottle tops arranged in a semi circle as his offering.

There lie Chantal and Olivia who died together in their above ground swimming pool when they were accidentally electrocuted by loose wiring on the pool pump. The angry echoes of their devastated father smashing down the pool walls with a hammer could be heard throughout the valley the next morning.

The parents of Glynn, who died of cystic fibrosis, camp at his grave every Sunday afternoon, sitting on deckchairs, sipping tea and chatting to his headstone about the week’s news. They arrive complete with the family dog and the pet cockatiel in its cage. In December they erected a full sized Christmas tree there too. Witnessing this ritual reminds me not to get old without a cause; to keep occupied lest I am so busy reliving memories that I forget to savour the present.

This particular cemetery is famous for having the largest number of above ground, family vaults in the southern hemisphere. It is Italians who prefer to be entombed in these marble mausolea, each of which has four levels and space for twelve caskets. These expensive vaults are a substantial investment for each family as the marble has to be imported from Italy. Each crypt competes with the next in its ostentatious display of decorative statues and gold lettering. We have become used to the loud, ranting voices of the Italian stonemasons who build these edifices. To us it sounds as if they are constantly arguing. After a lifetime spent in the sun, these diminutive men resemble dusty, gesticulating raisins.

It has struck me that the dead are just as compartmentalised and divided in the cemetery as they were in life. There is the Catholic Lawn, the Jewish Section, the Greek Orthodox Area, the Protestant Park, the Chinese Garden and the Italian Vaults – bodies separated into groupings of exclusive clubs based on culture, differing degrees of imposed guilt and determined by just which concept of a deity one was taught and indoctrinated about whilst one lived.

This catergorisation can lead to confusion when a person is seeking out the gravesite of a friend or relative. We were walking the dog through the cemetery when we were stopped by a stranger who was trying to locate a grave. By now, I am so familiar with the place that as soon as he said the name which he was looking for, I knew exactly where to direct him.

“Thank goodness I came across you or I’d never have found it,” he said gratefully. “You’d think that they could bury the deceased in date or alphabetical order. It would make finding a particular grave so much easier.”

I smell an accountant, don’t you?