We think the story is linear – beginning, middle and end. But ‘Once upon a time’ is a phrase whose words curl, tail over nose, like a sleeping cat. The beginning is not precise and I wonder whether all our stories in fact, not just the fairytales, are like this: ropes of twisted time, weaving one beginning to the end of another. The old man dies as the lusty boy is born, as if the breath had passed from one to another in a great incomprehensible chain of being.
My father died in winter, on 26 December. He ‘went home’, as my mother said, for Christmas. Cancer of the liver – long, slow and inexorable. We had had years to prepare. Still the moment took us blind. I know why people use the phrase ‘slipped away’ for Death can steal you so silently. With my weary mother asleep in the hospice bed next to his, and my eldest brother curled up on a camp mattress at its foot, between the moment when my sister kissed his head and the moment she returned from the bathroom, he was gone.
We had watched my father by increments growing ever so slowly weaker, smaller; his flesh falling in tired tiers, without an appetite for its bones falling away into loose unanchored folds. His skin had become like fine paper, the bones beneath protruding and pronounced. Every bit of him ached, yet he still kept his zest for life, weakly waving a toy balloon when his youngest grandchild entered the room. He did not want to die.
That same December day was also, coincidentally, the day that the baby boy we were so longing to adopt was born. We had waited four years to be chosen. I had met several times with his birthmother, a small-boned, gutsy woman with wavy hair and freckles, who spoke with a southern twang and had hungry, hazel eyes. Despite being beset with addictions, she was a generous person, whose first son, whom she was parenting, was adorable; but she was struggling and she wanted something different for her second son. We had talked and confided, her eyes sometimes calm, sometimes darting disconcertingly between hollow and fiery as we made plans together for his future; and I had felt so privileged to be asked to be there with her for his arrival. The phone call saying that she had gone into labour came as I sat at my father’s bedside taking my turn to bring the cup of water to his lips and adjust his pillows. He was breathing slowly and shallowly with long intervals between breaths; we knew it wouldn’t be long, but the nurses thought there might be time enough to go to the birth and return. I so much wanted his last grandson to meet him before he died. So, with his family alongside him, I left my father’s bedside just before midnight and rushed with my husband and daughter to a hospital two hours away to be at the birth of our son.
My husband entertained our four-year-old while I ran down the corridors to find our future son’s birthmother, already in close contractions, frantic with fear and unattended by a midwife. Greatly relieved to be together, we fell into each other’s arms, happy and anxious, clinging to one another the way survivors do in a crash. Thrown upon each other’s charity, we were uninhibited by our disparities of education and life experience. We were totally, baldly human. Two women from opposite poles simply committed to the flourishing of this new person, we were determined for his happiness, sharing a single hope; and afraid. It was not a simple birth; there was much noise and some confusion and a nurse who spoke little English. There was the impossibility of an epidural. There was the late but welcome arrival of a larger-than-life, capable, African-American, female doctor who settled everything admirably, taking charge like a captain in a storm.
Josiah, as he is now named, came into the world in the early hours of the morning bursting with life, wailing as loudly as a train, with lusty lungs and a leaping erection. He couldn’t have been more ready to live. His birthmother, his birth-grandmother, the social workers, my husband and I, all were elated to meet him. We all held and kissed him, we cried and laughed and blessed his beautiful beginning. We were full of joy. He was strong and he was very beautiful. He was loved. But it turned out that his birthfather was not the man whom everyone had thought, and Josiah would therefore grow up with skin darker than ours. Unacceptably darker, according to social services. He couldn’t belong with us, they said. And we couldn’t belong with him.
Reeling slightly as this news unfolded, I tried to adjust my future, and not just mine but his, and our family’s and his birthmother’s. The space we had made for him felt jagged as a wound, and all her hopes lay dashed. I swallowed the tears; there was a frightened and distraught birthmother, and a tiny baby with no home. This was not the time to examine my losses – these people needed to be held and loved. My husband, the birthmother and I passed Josiah back and forth, battling attachment; we three clutched each other’s hands, choking even on the softest words. We knew that if there wasn’t another family with acceptable skin waiting, he would go into care. Despite our brave intentions, our eyes began to leak and, in a circle of searing pain, we prayed that another family soon would be found for Josiah, so that he could go without delay to his new home and be loved as he deserved. A nurse who had heard only that we were not going to adopt came in and smiled at the baby, and then, as she looked up, her face contorted horribly. Her eyes pinched to a squint and poisonous words came spurting from her lips – how people like us should never be allowed near children, how racists were not wanted. Stunned by her hatred, speechless in a day in which words had already proven wholly inadequate, I turned to take a phone call from my sister.
In a ragged voice she said: ‘I have bad news.’
So there, in one brutal day, two men were taken from my life: a father and a son, a past and a future. I remember the tears, great torrents of them, and the uncontrollable sobs that tore out of me. I did not know in the days that followed what I was crying for most, which loss was the most hateful one; I could not differentiate or prioritize anything to do with these losses. There was just one large angry bruise that seemed to take up the whole of my waking days. In such times the body, its needs and routines, are like a keel that keeps the boat from overturning; and it is a great blessing to have others who depend on you, whose needs require you to emerge, to speak the familiar and to retain a sense of courtesy and decorum.
Josiah went to live with a loving family who already had a biracial son, in a country that now has a biracial president. I put the small clothes I had sewn for him in a drawer. I never heard about him again.
My father, whose life left him as Josiah’s emerged, was cremated and interred in the same grave as my grandfather, buried right on top of him, in the next layer up. Not, as one might have expected, in the grave of his own father, but in that of my mother’s father – a man of proud principles whom he had never met. So why did he choose a different blood family from his own? Why did he want to belong there, in the grave with a stranger, in the windswept yard of a church in which he had never worshipped, in a state from which he had moved away some twenty years earlier? It wasn’t as if he had hated his own father and mother, who had in fact bought a plot – what American mortuary jargon calls a ‘pre-need memorial estate’ – big enough for their whole family. There was a space waiting for him, next to his own kin, but he didn’t take it.
These experiences left me with deep questions. In life and in death what is it that makes us belong and to whom? Do we choose belonging? Why could Josiah not belong with us? Why did my father belong with his father-in-law? Where would I belong one day?
* * *
Many of us wonder, if we think about it at all, where we belong. We live in an age of unprecedented global migration. I am the youngest of five children, and for generations our family lived locally. We came from Switzerland to America in 1763 on grounds of religious persecution, Mennonites settling in Pennsylvania, safe among the Amish, the Quakers, the Shakers; and we stayed there in the undulating farmland of Eastern Pennsylvania, never moving more than a county or two in two hundred years. Then, in the space of one generation we upped and moved: first, as a whole family, to the south; then three of five children went abroad, married Europeans, and dispersed. We are not unique. Our towns and cities, our neighbourhoods are now made up of persons from all over the world who have moved seeking political, social, religious, financial freedom, or simply seeking any kind of employment, or in some cases adventure. Some have moved believing the promise that you can be a new person in a new place. Or simply because they can, for international law allows more movement and modern transportation facilitates it. We are the most mobile generation ever to live on the face of the globe.
In East Kent, where my husband was born, there are villages named Hawkinge, Ruckinge and Sellinge, places that contain as a fragment our family name, Inge. And in the phone book there are clusters of Tipplers and Fullers, surnames that match the ones listed in the front of his old family Bible. When we visit family in Kent we walk from farm to cottage on footpaths over fields sown and harvested for generations by familial hands. We wander with our children through a churchyard where tilting stones mark the resting place of Mary Amanda Tippler and ivy-covered John Inge, my husband’s great-grandparents, to the church in which my husband was christened; then back to lunch with cousins at an old mill house in which fifty years ago his christening party, photographed in black and white, took place and where, generations before, a dusty cousin who was a miller lived. If my husband belongs anywhere surely it is here. Wouldn’t it be right for his bones one day to lie in the place where for generations people of his blood and bone have been lowered into the earth, and where his infant head was washed, water and earth embracing him under the same Kentish sky?
Or does he belong to the people of Worcester? He is their bishop after all, and his predecessors sleep beside their deans in the cathedral’s cloister garden. Does giving your life to people mean they own you after death as well? After all, marriages have so claimed people since time began. Women, mostly, taken into the families of their men. But men too, like my father, are taken into the families of their wives. Does where you choose to spend your life mean more than where you come from? Do the people you choose become your family? And are these ties stronger than blood? For many people they seem to be.
Perhaps one’s bones belong to a landscape. The English poet John Betjeman’s remains rest on the side of the churchyard of St Enodoc’s in Cornwall, a church half-swallowed up in sand, uncertain whether it is emerging from the soil or sinking into it. He had enjoyed childhood holidays there and in his last years he lived nearby; it was a place he chose because, deep in his bones, he felt restored, renewed, revived by the Cornish coast. You can sit there next to his bones and breathe the air familiar to him and gaze out across the sloping fields to the river and the sea beyond, a water-shining, lustrous view still unmarred by intrusions. You can hear the same cry of gulls that he would have heard. Long after his eyes have become the food of worms you can open yours to claim the calm which that particular place promised him.
* * *
The deposition of human remains always makes a statement. In their last wills and testaments the dead speak unambiguously in the legal language of term and codicil, whereas in their choice of grave the dead speak in the language of symbol. Here people voice the unspoken or sometimes the unspeakable, often leaving their reasons unexplained – like my father, the disposal of whose remains raised as many questions as it answered. That doesn’t offend me. In fact, there is an honesty about it that I admire. He didn’t tell me everything about himself in life, and I don’t expect to know him perfectly either in death. You can love without knowing entirely. Most of us do.
It is perhaps partly because many of us die with things left unsaid that the disposal of remains becomes a kind of final utterance. Your choice of a burial site is perhaps one of the last things you can say. And, if that place is marked and public, you go on saying it for as long as the stones survive. One of the best-known ‘statement graves’ of this sort in England is that of the English tenor, Peter Pears, and the composer, Benjamin Britten, in Aldeburgh. The pair lived as a couple in a time when it was infamy to do so, but they found in Aldeburgh a haven. Britten once wrote of his home on the Suffolk coast: ‘I belong at home in Aldeburgh … all the music I write comes from it.’ Their burial side by side says, in a way that could not be articulated formally before their deaths, that they also belonged to each other.
Sometimes the last thing said is unintentional. I once came across a gravestone on the floor of an English country church where the deceased’s family had run out of money to pay a stone carver who had charged them per letter. The name of the deceased was recorded, along with her dates. But when it came to the inscription which was meant to read ‘Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost’, there were simply the words ‘Glory be to ye Father, & ye rest’. In perpetuity this stone confesses a love that exceeds its purse.
No less unintentional, though more serious, is the message that the English poet Philip Larkin took from the tomb of the 10th Earl and Countess of Arundel, whose effigies lie side by side in Chichester Cathedral. Originally companionable but discreet, these recumbent statues were altered upon restoration so that the Earl’s hand, slipped from its gauntlet, is holding hers. There they lie, he in his armour, she in her aulic finery, and that part of him that is unclad casting in stone the most common of human bonds. ‘What will survive of us is love’, writes Larkin.
Instinctively I want this to be true. Indeed, I yearn for this to be true. And I know that I am not alone in this wish, for the same sentiment can be found in countless poems and books, and even in the picture books that I have read to my children. We humans cannot believe that this great energizing force, this lifespan of longings fulfilled and unfulfilled, expressed and unspoken, that we call love can simply cease. It seems too great a thing ever to be extinguished. That love survives, my whole heart leaps to say. And yet, it makes no sense, for love is an action as much as a feeling: when I stir for the fourth time in the middle of the night to go to my troubled child’s bedside, I might be feeling intense frustration, but what I am doing is love. Love is active. Even were love merely a feeling, it would still require a living creature in order to exist, just as an action requires an actor.
What can we possibly mean when we say that what survives of us is love? Who is doing the loving and who is receiving it? If we say that the love lives on in those whom the deceased has loved, as if they had become saturated with love that would squeeze itself out in the world, this is no better. For the love that leaks from them onto the ones they in turn love is their love, not some imported love. We want our loves particular, not amorphous – the love of the beloved, not second-hand generic love. I do not wish it to be true but a part of me admits that, if we simply cease to be, our loving too must cease.
Unless of course we say that loving is a kind of energy which continues when the matter to which it is bound ceases. Or unless we hope for a resurrection.
* * *
We have lost so many of our stories. One of the most significant of these, I believe, is our loss of a narrative of meaning which for countless people over many generations was rooted in an overarching story of faith. In Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Church Going’ he stands in a building that for many has lost its day-to-day importance, imagining its eventual emptiness and how when it is a ruin it will still speak something its listeners can hardly understand. ‘And what remains when disbelief has gone?’ asks Larkin. The answer he gives is: a sense that here was held in unity ‘what since is found only in separation’.
While Larkin’s poem suggests that in the ‘cross of ground’ we understand ourselves and the transitions in our lives – marriage, baptism, death – in terms of what holds them and us together, increasingly we understand ourselves and our transitions in terms of collapse. We understand the parameters of marriage at its divorce rather than at its duration, and death as a finality rather than a gateway. Where a medieval worldview understood life by how it held together, we who have dissected the tadpole and divided the atom understand our world as much by how it falls apart. This is not a condemnation. This way of thinking has brought us so very many rewards, but it has also left us in some ways fragmented. Not only are we physically more mobile, we are also spiritually more eclectic, picking and mixing from a range of philosophies and beliefs. Added to this is a kind of social looseness – through social mobility and through social networking, we scatter our seeds of friendship more widely than ever before. We may belong less profoundly to any one place, but we visit a wider variety of places; we may not belong to any one person for a lifetime, but in the tabulation of virtual friends many belong to us.
Perhaps the increasing tendency to scatter ashes is one expression of these scattered lives. Apparently happy not to be remembered past the living memory of those family and friends who have loved us in life, we mingle with the earth in unmarked places, on hilltops, and at sea. Is this, I wonder, because we haven’t stayed in one place long enough to feel that we belong there deeply? Does place no longer spell out belonging? Or is it simply that length and depth are not the same thing – that we may feel deeply drawn to places with which we have no lengthy connection.
It is not at all uncommon for our dying wishes to name a place for the scattering of ashes that is a place we loved but not one in which we lived – rather one that we visited, one that revived our souls, much as Betjeman’s was revived by the Cornish coast. Here we were taken out of ourselves, or restored to ourselves. Here we felt most alive. This seems to me to be marking not where we lived our everyday lives but where we wish we’d lived. We must attempt a final arrival at some longed-for place. Is this an interpretation of heaven, I wonder? We have no idea where our soul may go, but we want to make sure our body ends up somewhere special. I can see the attraction of this, but I can’t help also feeling that the implication of wanting to be scattered somewhere that meant something to us is that the ordinary neighbourhoods of our days had not enough meaning for us. It is as if we have spent a life wishing to be elsewhere, or focused on somewhere we are not. We have lost either the will or the ability to see that where we are is the place of meaning.
* * *
Once you start carrying a book around in your head everything seems to echo: articles you read, snippets you hear on the radio, poems, facts, scientific discoveries all clamour to fill its empty pages. In this rather unruly fashion I have acquired a whole array of fascinating accounts of the unusual places bodies can go when they die. Ashes can, for instance, be mixed with oil paints for a specially commissioned picture. Being largely carbon, they can be compressed with other carbon into a manufactured diamond. In Herefordshire two years ago one man had the ashes of his son mixed with ink and tattooed under his skin so that his son might ‘be with him forever’, as the newspaper said. This comforted the father, though the forever of a forearm would never be enough for me.
One very practical ending, and perhaps a fitting one for people who all their lives have loved to work, is to let their bodies work in death as medical cadavers dedicated to the advance of science. The thirteenth-century Arab scientist who discovered the explosive properties of potassium nitrate derived from wood ash would, I think, be fascinated by the modern twist that you can mix human ash remains into the saltpetre of fireworks. If faith cannot get you there, well, modern cocktails of potassium nitrate at least can ensure you are shot into sparkling heaven in the guts of a zinging rocket.
These are just a few of the extraordinary new ways we are dealing with human remains. Such innovations are a huge departure from any funereal practices ever recorded. They have in common a wish to do something either remarkable or enduring with our remains, and a feeling that what we have done in the past is not remarkable or enduring enough.
Alongside personal innovations of this sort come eco-experiments that aim to return something of value to the earth. Eternal Reefs near Atlanta, Georgia invites the families of the dead to bring their ashes, mix them with cement and pour them into large bell shapes which are then sunk at sea to create artificial reefs to supplement the natural reefs that are so swiftly deteriorating. Tokens from the dead (a medal, a watch, a memento), handprints, messages may be pressed like totems into the fresh cement, a brass name plaque is added, and there is a service of dedication at sea. Certificates are given to the families, who can also order silver pendants with the loved one’s sea coordinates engraved on them or memorial plaques and t-shirts. If you have the means to do so, you can scuba dive on the anniversary of death to visit the fishy grave.
What intrigues me is that, although firmly physical, the whole project relies on a hope of eternity as one of its driving forces. It is implicit not only in the name of the firm but also in the stated intention of the founder, whose father wanted ‘to be surrounded by life forever’. Eternal Reefs state that their reefs are made to last forever and that they are designed ‘for people who are not done living’. There is a clear desire here to see death not as an end but as a continuation of life. Though of course the loved one’s body is, in fact, utterly dead. Whatever is living down there is entirely marine.
Woodland burials, too, aim to combine the wish to go somewhere beautiful with the desire to carry on doing good or being active even in death. Although this is a fairly recent practice in the United States, it is slightly longer established in the UK – there are woodland burial sites in thirty counties in Britain. Religious or non-religious markers may be used, but on both sides of the Atlantic the single uniting feature of these new burial options, the thing that ‘sells’ them to an enquiring public, is an overarching concern for the environment – woodland burial avoids the mercury emissions and other pollutants of cremation. It does not require the consumption of fuel or create greenhouse gases, and it releases pressure on land by preserving rather than gobbling up wildlife habitats.
One of the first conservation burial sites in the United States is Ramsey Creek Preserve in the mountains of South Carolina. This thirty-three-acre site, which opened in 1998, protects a quarter-mile of the stream and its surrounds. A walk through the preserve takes you along the Ramsey Creek as it drops along five rock shoals, through mainly deciduous woodland some of which has never been ploughed. Within this constant sound of falling water, 220 species of native plants thrive in a habitat that includes a full range of wildlife from snaking water moccasins to treetop squirrels and even the occasional black bear. A love of nature is what the place was made for. The chapel’s botanical windows feature violets, jack-in-the-pulpit, apple blossom, iris. On a table at the back are books about wildflowers and butterflies alongside offerings of pebbles and pine cones and an empty turtle carapace.
I visited Ramsey Creek with my family on a sunny day in mid-October. It was not hard to find. ‘You turn right after the Mennonite swing-maker’s house’, said Dr Campbell, standing with his arms crossed, grinning in the sunlight, with sandy light-brown hair and freckles and a small gold hoop earring in his left ear that seemed incongruous above his blue medical tunic.
We had driven just over an hour out of Greenville, with two cranky children in the back seat. It was too beautiful a day to be stuck in a car on a faceless Wal-Mart and Burger King road while the not-so-distant mountains bloomed in autumn’s best russet and gold. Adding to our frustration, the address we had in the town of Westminster took us not to the preserve at all but to a medical practice operating from a double-fronted former shop in an old-timey, brick-built strip with false façades and a covered walk in front. Main Street. It looked the brick equivalent of a Wild West town, without the swinging saloon doors. ‘Closed for training day’ scrawled on a bit of scrap paper was stuck in the window of the medical practice. I squinted and peered between the blinds. Nothing about the Ramsey Creek Preserve. And then I remembered that its founder was a doctor. Maybe this was the right address after all. Too bad it was the wrong day. I sighed. Then, just as we were about to head off, he appeared.
I got the feeling Billy Campbell was pleased to see us. Or maybe he was simply pleased with life. Easy to talk to, he nodded and smiled, happy in his skin. Sure, we could have our picnic in the preserve, he said, there were some tables down there, or we could just sit by the stream if we wanted. Disappointed that his English wife was not there to meet some people all the way from England, he told us about the small chapel they had moved to the preserve and the barn they had built, about the walking trails and the Mennonite farmers who were moving down from Ohio to settle in these fertile mountains.
The swing-maker’s house was easy to spot. Neat and well-built, there were, standing in front of it, a selection of gazebos for sale and a porch full of wooden swings, single and double, just like the ones I had seen so many times on the porches of Plain Folk in my childhood. Glider chairs too, that rocked on side arms rather than on cumbersome runners. Smooth and fluid, no porch swing since has ever rocked like one of those. I could almost feel the summers of my grandma’s porch. From beyond the screen door would come the clatter and chat of kitchen aunts, a smell of mint crushed in tawny tea, then the icy chink of cubes against my startled teeth.
Our October picnic at the preserve, however, was hurried by hunger. We sat in sawdust in a weathered wooden barn that was strung with fairylights and vines and filled with the satisfying scent of freshly-cut wood. Above, in a light and airy loft where double doors opened to mango-coloured treetops, we finished our melons in a tranche of warm sunlight. At home in this warm, drowsy American air, I would have liked to doze. But there was work to do – exploring.
We walked down trails that led into more trails, marked with little wooden signs, along a ridge for a while that fell sharply towards the sound of water. Here and there along the way on either side of the trail native stones would appear, lying flat, half-covered in woodland detritus, with words peeking out from the edge of curled-up leaves. Name only, or name and dates, or name and simple title: ‘Husband’, ‘Sister’, ‘Together again’. Some leaf-covered stones revealed nothing more than themselves, others contained a message. Half-hidden by a clump of fern, not far from the pious ‘With Jesus’, lay the impish ‘Later Babe’. Pushing leaves from one, my daughter discovered the postcard words ‘Dear Nature, Thank you, Evelyn.’
Scampering from stone to stone uncovering words, scrabbling after chipmunks, we simply didn’t notice the mounds at first. Suddenly I realized what one was. I spotted several dotted near the trail, and then, as I looked for them, deeper in the woods many more at irregular intervals. Small mounds already growing ferns and cyclamen before the ground had settled. Some had dates. Nine years on, and still not smooth. I stopped and peered between the trees as far as I could see. The recent dead were all around us. I shivered.
If a battle from the Civil War had been fought in these woods, as well it might have been, the fallen might have lain just like that, scattered, randomly, where they fell. I felt a lot of things – the slight indelicacy of trespassing here on these recent griefs; the eagerness of earth to take us back; how much more pleasant it might be to end up here rather than in a treeless municipal cemetery mown weekly and fenced in by iron bars; the brevity of life. We walked on. More dates. Yet another youngish person. So many of them were young. One stone, half-upright on a partially sunken mound, read: ‘I only know that/ Summer sang in/ me a little while/ that sings no more.’ Glad of a bit of poetry, I paused. And then, my reverie was severed by the loud halloo of children finding something fun.
It was a hole. Perfectly rectangular, about four foot deep, cut clean and straight through six inches of brown topsoil and then Carolina clay. There were dark stones in the red clay walls and small white circles where cut roots gasped in the unfamiliar air, aghast at the abruptness of their injury. Alongside this hole a large mound of red soil lay on a spread tarpaulin. It looked so incongruous, that rectangle, the lines of it so sharp, the only straight lines anywhere to be seen. Its rigidity was entirely out of place – a barbarous regularity in an undulating, slightly chaotic landscape. And it was made: the only manufactured thing in acres of uninstructed nature. Made and left behind. This bold rectangle lay as if a discarded door had been tossed among the trees with blind impertinence by some dereliction crew.
With wild abandon, my younger child jumped into it. Standing up to her shoulders in that death-shaped pit she beamed up at me with delight. ‘Look, mummy, a den!’ she called. ‘Come in!’
I demurred.
‘Come on’, she urged.
Startling as it was to see her in a grave, I did not yank her out. She was not in danger. The sides were not high. Either innocence or daring had hurled her there; she is rich in both, and they are qualities I admire and love in her. But I could not join her. That rectangle was a space too particular in purpose, and that purpose cruelly intimate; only innocence could enter such a space without violating it. A grief had started. Someone’s someone, not so different from me or my husband, tall among the trees, or one of my urgent children, would lie there. And the red soil would cover them. I looked at the displaced mound of red soil set to one side and wondered how even that large a quantity could ever fill so great a hole, because the space she now was playing in seemed profoundly hungry, as if it could go on swallowing forever and not be filled. I never knew before that void could be a territory.
Her fingers ran with eager fascination over pebbles and roots, looking for interesting finds. As she picked stones from its smooth cut walls, clumps of earth fell to the clean floor, and I thought of a family’s sorrow, and the habit we have of arranging things tidily in the face of death’s chaos. We needed not to muss the preparations. They are a mark of respect. It was time.
‘Come on,’ I called, ‘look, Daddy’s way up the trail. Let’s see if we can catch him.’ I extended my hand. She didn’t need it.
* * *
Only a state away from Ramsey Creek Preserve, near Atlanta, Georgia, Honey Creek Plantation also offers a natural burial service. Honey Creek is much larger, on a site covering 2,000 acres of woodland, and when I discovered that it is based in the grounds of a Cistercian Monastery of the Holy Spirit I felt as though several small threads of this book strangely came together. Photos of the monks there showed me men in the same white habits with black scapula as would have been worn by the monks at Sedlec, centuries earlier and an ocean away.
Cistercians have always lived close to the earth; these modern Cistercians have taken it upon themselves to save 2,000 acres of wilderness. Committed to silence and solitude, they write: ‘Some people have suggested that we sell bits and pieces of the land in order to take care of the Monastery well into the future. However we continue to believe that the property is not just for us but is a sacred trust that needs protecting for future generations, not only for monks, but for all those who hunger for places of peace, beauty and tranquillity.’ As the city of Atlanta rapidly grows out to meet them, their land has become essential for providing that solitude and silence which are hallmarks of the Cistercian Order and into which they ‘warmly invite all people’. I have always loved the woods and would be happy to end up in such a place myself although, if I could choose any woods in which to be buried, they would be either in the hills of North Carolina or in Pennsylvania, where the cocktail of hemlock and mountain laurel is blended to the perfect smell of home.
All of these woodland burial sites, whether English or American, aim to save, restore or establish significant wildlands. Burials must be ‘dust to dust’ with no embalming fluids, no vaults and only biodegradable caskets. One company I visited in England now makes woollen coffins. They come in the colours of sheep – creamy white or light brown with dark trims – and are lined with organic cotton.
Idealistic as these options may sound, they are mainly marketed in utilitarian terms – an opportunity to make ourselves useful in death, as do those who devote their bodies to medical science. We are invited to give something back. But these green endings are not only utilitarian. For many people there is something verging on the spiritual about them. When the British naturalist Professor David Bellamy, an enthusiastic supporter of woodland burial, writes, ‘I can think of no better way of celebrating the continuity of creation than becoming part of a tree in a piece of countryside destined to become woodland, full of wild flowers, wildlife and birdsong, for ever and ever, Amen’, there is the ring of a prayer about his words.
I would not want to belittle the spiritual value of woodland burial any more than the spiritual value of any other kind of burial. But it is easy to muddle utility, spirituality and the expiation of guilt in one unthought bundle. Green burials plug into our modern Western guilt about having used too much of the world’s resources in our lives. In our death we are given the chance to make amends by becoming food for trees, by our purchase of a green burial site helping to contribute to the preservation of a parcel of wild land, by the planting of trees on a new woodland site increasing the contribution of oxygen to the planet, or by restoring marine habitat. All have in common a deep attachment to the physical world. This world is the one to which we are making a final contribution. When that decision is the culmination of a life governed by environmental issues it seems a fitting end; when it is a kind of attempt to pay back the earth for a life spent abusing it, it is not so very dissimilar from a medieval indulgence: live however you like and then buy this piece of land to ensure a beneficent end. In this way our green salvation is less an expression of spirituality and more like our final consumer choice.
That so many choices exist is itself typical of Western modernity, but I believe there are further ways in which emerging trends in dealing with the dead mirror our times. Having lost a place we call home, we cast our remains to the wind. Less sure than we used to be about the existence of heaven, we create material paradises. Uncertain that we will live forever, but still longing to do so, we try to live on in marine reefs and preserved wilderness. Our loss of religious certainty, our loss of place and our longing for the eternal are all reflected in the increasingly inventive means of disposing of our bones. I suspect that beneath these displacements lie larger questions. Is there ultimate meaning at all? What is the story of our universe? Is it all a series of accidents?
Perhaps we do not know where our remains should belong because we do not know where we belong in this larger story. In fact, what we do know about our biological past and about the far reaches of space suggests that our brief lives have little meaning at all. We have relied so much on science to answer the big questions about where we come from and where we are going, and it has told us this: that we are blips in an ancient and unimaginably vast universe. This fills many with as much fear as the notion of eternal torment filled our ancestors.
In his classic philosophical and psychological study The Courage to Be, the twentieth-century German-American theologian and existential philosopher Paul Tillich describes the three stages of anxiety in the history of Western civilization: in the Ancient world, anxiety about our fate; in the Medieval world, an anxiety concerning guilt and condemnation; and in the Modern age, our anxiety about meaninglessness. In each age anxiety focused mainly, although not exclusively, on a particular concern.
Part of being human, Tillich argues, is anxiety, which will surface in different forms and become a fear. It seems to me that the fear it becomes depends on the story in which we understand ourselves as living. In an age of fate, the fear is that the story is already written, that we are merely passive players. In an age of judgement, the fear is that the part we play is doomed, that our actions and intentions are never good enough. In an age of meaninglessness, the fear is that there is, in the end, no story.
Where the ancient Age of Fate may have offered the possibility of nobility through resignation, and the medieval Age of Judgement bred a sense of the possibility of justice, the Age of Meaninglessness seems devoid of classical virtues, for these develop within a narrative and meaninglessness by its nature undermines plot. So perhaps the gift of an Age of Meaninglessness is that one may feel freer to look in various directions.
Mainly we look for meaning backwards – ‘where have we come from?’ is the great Darwinian question that has dominated our investigative urges in recent times. Not at all confident about where we are headed as a human race, we do however feel fairly confident about the direction from which we have come. Our questions of origin are being answered in new ways all the time and, although there are still large and significant gaps in our knowledge, we understand more than we ever have before about how it all works: our bodies, our minds, our planet, our universe. But the ‘why?’ question remains.
In fact the ‘why’ question seems to have grown larger and more pressing as our attention has been focused on finding the answer to ‘how’. Look at all the anxiety we now have about happiness, about wellbeing, about the meaning of life. The self-help industry and the wellbeing gurus all try to address this nagging question of why – what is it all about, what does it all mean? What fascinates me is that, in this dramatic cultural and psychological change from the medieval to the modern, bones have remained a primary carrier of our hopes and fears. Where the medieval mind took particular care of human remains in the fear of eternal judgement, the modern mind looks for solutions that combat the fear of ultimate meaninglessness. The questions may be different, but the carrier of those questions is largely unchanged: robust and fragile, renewing and inescapable, our bodies, and in particular their most enduring elements – our bones.
* * *
During my travels bones have become for me a metaphor for the enduring and essential, the deep things that remain once all the skin and the muscle of life is gone. There they lay, hard core of our soft bodies, perhaps one of the firmest things in our fluid lives. On a planet that is mostly water we are people made mostly of water with this one rigid element – our bones. Two hundred and six of them. Around this remarkable, renewable frame cling every muscle, every sinew, every artery, every nerve, and in the protection of these bones hide our most vulnerable organs. Where some creatures wear their skeletons on the outside to protect their flesh, we come into life unarmoured, ready to be wounded. In fact, the first sign of independent life is the severed flesh of an umbilical cord.
Amazingly resilient as it is, our exterior is subject to an enormous degree of change. Yet, most of how we identify ourselves – our face, skin, hair, eyes – is carried on the outside. We primp and preen, we clothe and style, and we surgically enhance; and all the while our bones quietly carry us. The journey into bones is a journey into this interior. Not just, of course, the chemical and physical interior of calcium and cartilage, of red and yellow marrow, but a journey into the core of the body that corresponds with a journey into the centre of the self – that thing we sense when we say ‘I feel it in my bones’. The bones are the firm frame of your body, this journey suggests – what is the central core of your self? Call it a soul if you will, whatever name you give it will not explain it entirely. The deep part; the thing that remains as flesh falls away.
Four charnel houses, it seems to me, have asked four disquieting questions: Are the broken parts of your deep self being healed? (Czermna.) Have you found a lasting hope? (Sedlec.) What are the things for which you will be remembered? (Hallstatt.) Are you on a path of true humility? (Naters.)
I want to live with those four questions and to try to answer them. Perhaps answer is not the right word. What I really mean is that I want to hold myself in some way answerable to them. Some questions I think remake us. Because they probe the corners of our psyche, because they do not go away. They work away at us and we work away at them and sometimes we carry them for a lifetime and yet the answer we come up with is not one that can ever be written down. When we finally go to say the words, we find – perhaps to our dismay – that they have already been spoken, not with our lips but with our lives.
* * *
There’s something about bones. It’s strange. We would not hesitate to discard a toenail, a tooth, a sweeping of hair. The skin of the dead is repulsive. But for bones we have a different regard. They are calcium just the same as a tooth or a toenail; just the same, they are dead. Their service is obsolete, they are bound to disintegrate. And yet, around the globe, over millennia and across cultural and religious divides human bones speak a language of common respect. I think I understand now at least part of why that is. I think it is because these bones are not merely the remains of a particular person; they are carriers of our common humanity, and bearers of shared hopes and fears.
In this book I have written about several kinds of fear. The fears I have experienced in childhood; in travelling; the fear of judgement that so characterized the medieval mind; the fear of meaninglessness that besets us in the present day; and the fear of death, in which so many of these others meet. But there is another kind of fear that I have only recently begun to appreciate. It is a fear that has little to do with terror and more to do with awe and respect. It is what terror may become when its object is demystified – terror transformed, if you like.
When I return from my travels and stand at the mouth of my charnel house, this transformed fear is what I feel. Not frightened of the bones, but respectful of them. I respect them partly because of the simple fact that they are human. Like Vaclav Tomaszek, I want to credit value to the bones in my charnel house because they were people. That is reason enough. Because they lived and loved and suffered and joyed and died. And this last fact is also a particular reason why I respect them. However young or old, however rich or poor, they have done the dreaded thing. They have been where each of us fears and none of us has gone.
I respect them too because I am one of them, inheritor of their DNA, a sharer of their very matter. Their dust is my skin, renewing itself, along with my bones and every cell in my body, every seven years. Dust to dust I already am, and in this respect in death I shall only do what I have always done: change matter into matter.
For all of these reasons the fear I feel on my return is a different kind of fear. It is something similar to what I remember hearing described in my childhood as ‘the fear of the Lord’, which was not meant to be a terror or a dread, but a deep awe of and respect for God. The fear of my charnel house neighbours is something like that for me now. The bones do not frighten me, but I hold them in wonder and reverence. Both the fear and the reverence are saying that there is something big and not wholly understood here, something outside myself that connects with my deepest self in ways I cannot explain. It is akin to the Holy.
* * *
Thoreau went to the woods to live deliberately, to suck at the marrow of life, to look at bare essential things. I went to Silesia and back to stay with the sight of bare bones until they frightened me no more. Each stop on the way asked its questions of me, in bold and implacable silence. Thousands and thousands of eyeless sockets have stared me through, and sometimes in the face of those stares I felt as hollowed out as the honeycombed centre of a femur, light and febrile, easily snapped. ‘What you are we were’, they say with chilling calm, stacked chin on cranium in a tall wall of certainty, ‘What we are you shall be’. And it is true. We are dust and to dust we shall return. This fills me with great sorrow, for I too want my small moment to be magnificent. But it fills me also with humility, and gratitude; and gratitude makes whatever we have enough.
I do not know how much more time I have to live my questions out, but I am glad I started asking them even before the cancer came for, although they cannot be rushed, these are questions that must not be avoided. This is true whether or not you have been diagnosed with a frightening disease. The questions these charnel houses asked of me stir me to life-enriching responses. Are the broken parts of your deep self being healed? Get rid of the bitternesses. Mend the bridges. Seek and receive forgiveness. Let yourself be loved. Have you found a lasting hope? Anchor yourself in the eternal and abiding (for me this is God). Feed yourself something stronger than optimism. You are in a constant state of growth and transition, so let change transform you. What are the things for which you will be remembered? Cut the crap in your life. Do the things that matter. Find and exercise your gifts. Are you on a path of true humility? Submit to a truth that is bigger than yourself. Become part of it. Let it be your story. What I have been surprised to discover, as these questions chase and wash over me, is that preparing to live and preparing to die are in the end the same thing.
* * *
I have long been seduced by fear and by freedom, sensing that the two things are related, and liking them both for the taste they put in your mouth. Electric, tinged metallic. Take the coin of Thrill and toss it in the air. Its two faces whirl and blur – fear, freedom, fear, freedom – and then it lands. And the landing for me was always a disappointment. Even when you won, you lost something. You lost the blur. In the solid slap of palm upon the coin, whatever its upturned face, you lost the whirl.
Since this adventure began, another coin has been tossed into the air. It whirls past my ear like a whisper. I can almost see the blur of its two faces: death, life, death, life. Whichever way it lands I know the feeling will be freedom. Because freedom is inside me. It doesn’t depend on the coin.
My story is a human story and a sacred story that joins with all such eternal stories from the chick-in-egg skeletons of Hallstatt’s Neolithic necropolis to the woodland burials at Honey Creek Preserve. It is amazed at the things it sees, it ponders things it cannot see, it lives in love and hope. None of us can know whether the story we live by is provably true, only whether we are true to it. And that, I think, cannot be decided in a day. You see, here I am again, talking about life and how to live it well. Well, there are so many things I do not know. But one thing I hold close: living isn’t something outside you that you will do one day when you have organized your life a little better. It comes from deep in the centre of yourself. You have to let the life in, there at the deepest part, and live it from the inside out. My visits to four charnel houses all say the same thing to me: Return. In your cellar is the salt of life.
* * *
Dark in a February evening I resolved to return to my own charnel house. The ink-black sky outside my tall study windows was speckled with orange city lights. Headlamp twins of homeward cars winked across the river bridge, and lights from under its stone arches smeared the swollen Severn below with yellow rippling stripes. The children were in bed. This time it was not so much that I didn’t want them to know as that I didn’t want to be disturbed. I wanted to take time with my cellar bones and listen to whatever they might murmur. And yet I had to wait, for I needed help lifting the trap door lid and my husband was reading our little one a story.
I listened with tingling ears to the undulations of his engaging voice but could not decipher the words. Deep rumblings which I took to be bears were followed by the high ‘beep, beep’ of some alerted vehicle. A discernible ‘Oh no!’ was followed by a murmur of narration. One delighted giggle chased a lusty laugh and the sweet childish voice I love so well demanded more. I love that little voice. And I am losing it. Every time I phone when I am away, to say goodnight or what time my train will arrive, I hear that it has altered incrementally since the last time I heard it over a telephone line, and I know that one day before too long I will phone up to find that the last bit of little child will have gone from it for ever.
So I listened, at my desk, with inky blackness pressing in at every pane. I listened with a kind of lover’s hunger and I tried to imagine ways of describing it, so that I could hold it or, failing that, so that after it was gone I could summon it. If it were a colour, what colour would it be? If it were an animal, what animal would it be? If it were a song … and then, as if she had read my mind, she was singing, with her head on her pillow and it was not the nursery rhyme we sang a month ago, but a crooning song about a heartbeat. For already she was in love with a boy with curly hair and mischievous eyes and, before her baby voice had entirely left her, she was inviting her girl voice to come. The beauty and brevity of this life swelled in my solar plexus like a warm loaf of heavy bread.
But at last she slept, and we followed the twisting staircase down and down again, past the curious storerooms, cold and colder, their dark recesses flashed with bright ends of tricycle chrome and glinting jars of jam, through a crooked doorway where you had to duck a little, towards the charnel house. While my husband fiddled expertly with a screwdriver and the tricky lid, I struck the match and lit the black wick of our dinner candle stub. The short silver candlestick was smooth and cold between my fingers and thumb. The cover off, I stood at the mouth of the entrance pit, hesitating like a beginner at the edge of a diving board.
‘Ooh, a bit spooky’, I said over my shoulder with feigned lightness, peering down, then standing up again. He offered to go down first. ‘No, I want to do it’, I replied. It was half of the truth. I had not rid myself of reservations about death. I was neither sanguine nor careless in the face of this darkness.
I lower myself cautiously into the entrance pit. Ducking my head through the breezeblock gap I hold my candle up towards the medieval walls beyond, noticing as I didn’t the first time the neatness of the stone work. Cut red sandstones, the same as those used in the cathedral, rise to a neat arch above, but there will not be space enough to stand unless I actually enter the chamber. Pressing further in, I hold the candle down towards my ankles. There is a small gap or gulley that I must cross between the new breezeblock wall and the medieval one; about two feet wide and maybe three feet deep, it is not difficult but I want to find sure footing.
I see I was wrong the first time I came down here about there being nowhere to step. In fact, as I put my candle down around my feet, I see that there is a kind of path rising abruptly from just the other side of the gulley. Narrow as a sheep trail, it has been worn over and between rising mounds of bones. There are bones, not floor, beneath it, and at the edge, where the modern opening in which I am crouched has been cut, bits of bone jut out from below the path like the jagged struts of a broken basket.
I cannot work out what the path is made of. It looks like sandy concrete, but this makes no sense, and it is febrile and crumbly. Compacted dust perhaps? A trail of ashes? Hundreds of years of crushed skulls. I dread stepping across the gap onto what might prove to be crumbling dust, and the sound of cracking bone beneath my feet. I don’t know how far down the stone floor is beneath these bones, how far I might fall were they to give way beneath me, and for one fearful moment I imagine myself suffocating under a tumble of skeletons. I pause.
As I stretch my candle arm, a cold chill of air steals up my sleeve, but I can see. Clearly others have walked here before me and I must trust their precedence. Crouching and stepping over the sharp shard of a splintered rib and avoiding the smooth crown of a skull, I cross the gap gingerly, first one foot, then the other. And then, with sure feet, I am inside, standing to full height, surrounded by heaped skeletons.
The candlelight, completely local, requires me to bring it and myself close to anything I hope to see and, as I stoop and rise, alternating clean sweeps of arch above and sloping mounds of bone below appear from and disappear back into darkness. In this candlelight I can see either what lies ahead of me or what lies beneath my feet, but I cannot see both at once. I must make this choice with every step. And so I go very slowly, raising the candle out in front, above, and then stooping down to illuminate my feet where femur-ends like fists thrust up between skulls, and yellowed teeth gleam in the upside-down hollow of a battered cranium.
Hot wax drips from its sideways tilt as the candle flickers. Swiftly I right it. I have left the matches on the table in the room behind me and if this candle goes out I will be in utter darkness. A dark grey femur juts out by my ankle, and rising I make a mental note not to trip. I press on, raising and lowering my small light, trying to discern the dimensions of this chamber. I am amazed how little light one candle gives and also how it changes everything. Being here without it is unthinkable.
I follow the compacted path slowly, tentatively, stopping to shine the light to right and left, above my head and down towards my feet. I want to see if that shape I sense before me is an ancient window or a door, and as I speak into the darkness I see my breath before me rise with every word in little clouds. I love that breath. I love that it is mine, alive down here in this cold charnel house, silvery like a spirit.
I raise the candle up, and find there is still room to stand, and only about twelve feet until the end. And then in tiny steps I am there, at the former entrance high up in the wall, once entered from the cathedral side, blocked up and hung with cobwebs so thick and long and so sullied by a hundred years of dirt that they look like blackened twine. They do not sway. There is no movement in the air, no breath but mine. Around me either side of this compacted path the mounds of skulls and bones in jumbled heaps lie still – cranial curves and the knuckle-ends of thighs, a skull-less mandible the bottom half of a macabre laugh. I am not afraid; but neither do I want to let the candle linger on that laugh. Heart thumping, I shine the light along the walls to illuminate, insofar as I can, the fanning arches of the vaulted ceiling, and see that I have reached the limit of this subterranean box.
With a strange reluctance I do not fully understand, I turn. Picking my way slowly along the route I came, I trust now the load-bearing capability of the path. I know where to avoid the tripping femur, and I anticipate the angle of the slope. There is no rush. I look at the candle stub burning low against the silver. How white the silver gleams. I love its perfect smoothness to my touch. A drip of wax spills over, lava to my startled finger. This too I love, this being alive with skin that burns. The rectangle of yellow light ahead shines into the entrance pit beyond me.
At the two-foot gap I pause. Of course I do not want to stay down here. And yet I hesitate; I am not likely to visit these bones again. It is not so much that I want to stay in this place as that I want its pace to stay with me. I like being able only to see what is ahead of me or what is at my feet but not both at once. I like having to pay attention. I want to thank the bones; they have taught me this. Not just here, but in Czermna and Sedlec, in Hallstatt and Naters.
To be present in a moment is not hard. But it takes all of you. You have to listen well and look long. You have to engage your heart, bringing your fear and your hope to the same place, for what is hope without an element of dread? Unless it teeters at the edge of loss it is a saccharine thing, a Disney wish. Unless it is prepared to set belief to work it is mere optimism. There is a bond between the living and the dead that is a kind of door to hope. We look at them and know what we shall be, and determine to do with our brief span some life-bringing thing. This is hope. Not waiting for a rescue, or to be woken from a sleep; not gambling on a bit of luck, not dreaming dreams, but bringing breath and love and sweat to bear upon the darkness.
As I clamber out, my husband hoists me up in one smooth stretch. With few, inconsequential words we replace the charnel lid, the panel of floor and its edging, the rug, the barley twist table and the chairs. I blow the candle out and pick the hardened wax. Upstairs, in almost monastic silence, we wash our dusty hands.
My study windows still are inky-black. I toss another log upon a dwindling fire, watching orange sparks that fly from it brief and bright, expiring in the moment that they thrive. They say it will be three degrees below zero tonight, and I am grateful for this heat as I am for the fire’s promise of company. I am grateful for the basket full of logs, for the one who carried them here, for the one who chopped them, for the tree that grew a hundred years and died to make such heat.
I want to tell the bones what they have given me, but they have no ears to hear and no eyes to see. So I will tell it whole to those who still have flesh on, speaking from my bones to theirs while there is breath to do so and life to live the words out. The beautiful brevity of this life throbs in me like an overgrown heartbeat. It sings in my bones, it lifts my ribs as I stretch high to draw the curtains closed against the night. Till dawn I write.