I started walking the cemetery paths during lockdown. Lockdown: a strange noun to define a period of my life, but there it is, for me as for all of us. 'Lockdown' is no longer a 'thing' so much as a specific few months, or a whole year depending on where we lived and how we reacted to it. One of my reactions was to start walking among the dead. I continue to do so. I find it grounds me.
I take a different route each time, led by the brightness of a flower, or the intrigue of a newly fallen tree, the busyness of the first large bumble of the year or the stillness of the deer before they become aware of my presence and flit away.
My preference is for the older sections of the burial ground, which are now managed for wildlife, being left to overgrow to some extent. The grass grows long in summer and trees soar from the resting places of forgotten souls. Stones lean and fall. Eternal memory is eroded by weather into flakes or dust, or is smothered under lichen in its subtle greys or eerily luminescent lime. Living ivy curls around columns of its stone cousins.
My progress slows as I stop and stoop to peer at petals of vibrant yellow or virginal white, holding rain drops like sequins on a gown. I am astonished at how much noise one bee can make and it had never occurred to me before that I am simply listening to its flight. Already astonished that those delicate, beautifully veined wings can lift the creature, to consider the effort required to keep them moving at such a speed leaves me mind-blown. There is a simple pleasure to be had contemplating the bee as it circles the holly, examining each cluster of flowers to decide which are worth further attention, browsing like a guest at a buffet, ensuring that the best of everything is sampled before moving on to see what is available at other tables.
Is it disrespectful, I wonder, to photograph the stonemason's art in situ? But the thought doesn't cause much hesitancy as I seek out images and carvings. At times I wonder at names and dates: those wives who outlived husbands by fifty years or more and yet were lain to rest beneath the same stone. Those other monuments that bear only the first incumbent's details and so much space for those to follow, who never did. Reunions that were never meant to be, not even in the graveyard.
For a time I sit by the fountain, where a plastic heron eyes the goldfish, safe beneath their black netting, a funereal veil for the pondside plants. Is there irony in the sign that warns: Danger. Deep Water? And the lifebuoy on its stake?
During that silent spring two years ago this became one of my favourite haunts. Even in those strange days, I did not come here to think about death or the dead and the dying. I walk my slow meditations here in affirmation of life. It's the wild and self-wilding flowers that catch my eye, stray hyacinth and escaped daffodils, the perfection of trees in bud and bloom. I fail to track the muntjac, watch squirrels squirrelling, salute the solitary magpie, and smile as the skittish jay bird skips away.
And I'm not surprised at how much laughter there is to be heard, when people are about. The Christian burial rites include the words in the midst of life we are in death. I think the reverse is true: in the midst of death we are in life. The earth takes back what we lay on and in her, takes back even the memorials we would raise and raises instead tall larches and birches and oaks and holly, food and shelter, and beauty. When all our paltry wreaths have been worried by wind and rain, and wrangled away by resident foxes, she throws us snowdrops, anemones, and primroses, Queen Anne's Lace and poppies, flowers from the last snows of spring to the first leaves of autumn. Today, I look past the grape hyacinth for the first signs of bluebells.
And I come home with nettle stings and a pocket full of cedar roses.
