My mother’s memory arrived again unexpectedly, as it is prone to do from time to time. It has been over forty years, yet the pain of her death lingers with me as fresh as if it happened yesterday. Emotional memories are funny things. It’s a whole-body visceral feeling. I’m sure there was some unconscious trigger setting it off. Damn, my amygdala.
Don’t think less of me, but since her funeral in 1980, I have never visited her gravesite. And I only ever called on my dad’s gravesite once after his untimely death a few years earlier—on the day of my mother’s passing before making her funeral arrangements. Somehow, I felt someone should tell him that his sweetheart of 35 years had died. Long since not on talking terms, I may have asked God to wait outside the cemetery gates.
Our society has many taboo subjects, things we aren’t good at discussing. Politics, religion, and sex, and other topics like capitalism’s flaws, inequality, growing old, quality of life, euthanasia, and death, are high on that growing list. We are a nation of ostriches with heads firmly stuck in the sand. Willful ignorance. No wonder we’re so f*@ked up. Clearly, we don’t like sad, somber, and inconvenient truths.
So, I thought I’d put a happy face spin on graveyards. You ready?
Aside from the birds I buried in shoeboxes and fish guts side-dressed into our rose beds, I remember my first graveyard. Who doesn’t, right? Gettysburg. It was the same family road trip my parents took me to Arlington National Cemetery to visit The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and JFK’s Eternal Flame—an American history trifecta of grief tourism.
My dad, a Purple Heart WWII vet, taught me to respect those who died in battle along with the poem “In Flanders Field,” …the poppies blow between the crosses, row on row… I have tried to instill that in my kids, taking them to West LA’s National Cemetery on Memorial Day to show respect. Urging them to never join the military and be cannon fodder for any unsound political cause.
But unwittingly, my parents turned me into a morbid tombstone tourist. And that I am. Just don’t call me a taphophile. (And no, this is not a travel piece! More cultural anthropology.)
Aside from visiting the scenes of tragic, usually war-related, historic sites worldwide, I occasionally go out of my way to visit cemeteries on my travels. Not because I know anyone buried there—Unless reincarnation is a thing?—but because I know of them, historically speaking.
It’s a curious thing how we remember our dearly departed. Because I submit to you, they don’t care. They’re dead! It’s all about us. Famous cemeteries today are equal parts art museums, sculpture gardens, parks and nature preserve-like urban green spaces. They’re quiet and peaceful, and historical. Aside from graveyards being an excellent source for fictious names, the symbols on headstones, tombs and graves have meaning and say a lot about us and our culture. Often, even irreverence is respectful.
For instance, obelisks personify greatness. Broken columns reveal a life cut short. Ivy signifies immortality. Celtic crosses suggest eternity. Doves imply innocence. Lions protect the dead from evil spirits. Wheels expose the certainty of the circle of life. Clearly, ego, status, and wealth dictate headstones grandiosity, but vampires…well, I dunno what they mean.
I have visited many fascinating gravesites worldwide. Like Grant’s Tomb, the Ming Tombs, the Royal Tombs of Petra, the catacombs of Paris, Rome and Istanbul, Hollywood's Forest Lawn, and Cairo’s City of the Dead. It’s tough to find a cold beer in a necropolis!
During my first visit to Paris, I made a pilgrimage to Jim Morrison’s grave in Père-Lachaise. Then stopped by the tombs of Oscar Wilde*, Chopin, Proust and Modigliani, all taking well-earned dirt naps. Egypt’s pyramids are, of course, the granddaddy of all graves, aren’t they? The Taj Mahal is spectacular. John Lennon isn’t buried in Central Park, but that’s where his ashes were scattered, and Strawberry Fields is a special place. As is Raj Ghat, Mahatma Gandhi’s Delhi memorial—he was cremated, as there are no Hindu graveyards.
Weirdly, some want to preserve the corpora of famous—some would say, infamous people. And I’ve visited a few: Uncle Ho’s (Chi Minh) embalmed body lies in an enormous Hanoi mausoleum. Mao’s rotting crystal coffin encased carcass in Tianmen Square—that since 1989 has been hopefully haunted by the ghosts of dead democracy-wanting students. I’ve been to Russia but have not visited Lenin’s acetic acid and vodka-preserved cadaver.
Evita’s gauche mausoleum in Buenos Aires’s upmarket Recoleta Cemetery is puzzlingly the #1 tourist attraction in all of Argentina! Wonder if she’s turning in her grave about that? Kind of like Elvis’s last resting site at Graceland, though I’ve never been. I was haunted seeing Prague’s Old Jewish Cemetery—rather crowded with over 12,000 headstones and 100,000 buried bodies. Said hello in London to Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin in Westminster Abbey and Karl Marx in Highgate. I visited Jesus’s fabled empty tomb in Jerusalem’s Church of the Holy Sepulchre. I remember picnicking once outside the perimeter of a desert graveyard called the Airplane Boneyard at the edge of Tucson, Arizona. Yes, it’s an airplane graveyard. A fantastic sight. If you’re a plane nerd, like me.
I also have some fond graveyard memories.
Like when my traveling partner and I may or may not have broken into King Tut’s tomb in Luxor’s Valley of the Kings on our way to making travel history in ’89. It was early and hard to tell if the sacred site was open. I don’t think it was, but you’d have to ask the friendly tomb custodian who was paid baksheesh to look the other way for confirmation. A tomb raider, I am not. Then a few days later, we scaled a cemetery wall around midnight in search, erroneously, of Leonardo da Vinci’s final resting spot in Chambéry, France. We whistled aloud, searching in vain. But know that Leo is actually, supposedly, maybe even feasibly buried at Chapel of Saint-Hubert in Château d’Amboise, France. But not in Chambéry, and we have a signed affidavit from a ranking graveyard shift gendarmerie to prove it!
I remember taking my kids on a walkabout in the Kathmandu Valley of Nepal one morning. We came across scores of smokey, burning funeral pyres lying along the banks of the sacred Bagmati River. They watched speechlessly as despondent families brought dying relatives on gurneys to the riverside, where they were cleansed before soon dying. Then immediately upon expiring, the eldest male would light a wooden cremation fire. Their ashes eventually swept into the muddy river. It was sobering. I can tell you firsthand that you never forget the smell of burning flesh once it enters your nostrils! (I am almost, pretty sure, they weren’t scarred for life?)
I’ve decided, cultural relativism notwithstanding, that I don’t want to be buried, embalmed, cremated, frozen, or mummified when I die. Just don’t like the idea of being interned—it seems bad—or my ashes in an ugly urn on the mantle. I don’t want a fancy coffin symbolizing something essential to me (Buried in a giant book? Or strapped in an airplane seat?) like in Ghana. No thanks. Nor am I interested in a joyous big horn jazz band marching me to an above-ground boneyard, ala New Orleans. Or even having my body crushed into a pulp and placed in a Haida totem pole like they do in British Columbia. No burial at sea either—I get seasick.
No, when the time comes—If they find the body!—I want a Tibetan Buddhist sky burial. Just lay my empty carcass on a hill outside and let the birds and critters have at it. The circle of life. Poetic justice. Forget dust to dust and ashes to ashes; it would be gut to gut.
But it is still to be determined if my family will grant my final wish, though. What is more, the sad fact is, I’ll probably end up a ghost in an online digital graveyard, memorialization in perpetuity on some social media platform. How demeaning. My presence immortalized, unintentionally by default—because no one knows my passwords to delete me!
*Travel Pro Tip #832: Never kiss Oscar Wilde’s gravestone. Just don’t!
Thanks for the privilege of your time, it is the most precious thing we have, and I appreciate it. Be well.
William D. Chalmers © 2022 GreatEscape Adventures, Inc. All Rights Reserved.