A graveyard in England is rife with life. Even in October the graveyard is green. Soil rarely shows, shrouded by a tangle of grass in all stages of growth and senescence, leaves of so many different shapes they lose definition to human eyes, tough stems and new stems, shocks of roots, crowds of brambles, clumps of moss, and even now, flowers, little white clusters of yarrow. In the spring there are snowdrops and daffodils. Under the plants are crawling things, and in the trees are flying things. Footpaths are worn over grass or blanketed in rust-colored yew needles (death-dealing if you eat them); headstones are skew like Jack-o’-lantern teeth with a green patina of age and the steady crawl of ivy. If the Friends of the Ascension Parish Burial Ground didn’t have their monthly work parties to keep the life at bay, within months, perhaps, you wouldn’t know there were any dead kept and remembered here on All Souls’ Lane.
Today’s first task is to scrape ivy off headstones with plastic ice scrapers. Those early veins of deep green, the zigging stem with its jaunty emerald leaves that set off the stone so aesthetically, are always a bit of a shame to strip down, but it’s easy to see the end result of their incursions on headstones that were missed the last few work parties: erasure of monuments, transforming them into topology alone. So I follow the stems down the stone, popping off each juncture of roots, the little gray fan of fibers like centipede legs that have ingratiated themselves with the grain of the rock, sometimes taking flakes of headstone with them as they pull away. This is only a delay; I don’t try to uproot the whole endless plant.
I think about life and death every time I come here. It sounds cliché, but when I’m kneeling on a grave hacking at plants, the thoughts feel layered, like the grass. First I think about the contrast between our active party, our eager work and movement across the ground and in the light so symptomatic of the phase of our existence, and the silent anonymity of the people the graves are meant to mark[1]. I think about how soon each of our bodies will enter that phase of stillness, like them—sooner, most likely, for the white-haired Friends I’m working with than for me, but the difference between this burst of now and the long tenure of the grave is essentially the same for all of us.
But then there’s the life. As I peel up mats of moist moss like an oblong toupee off of the stone border of a grave bed, or tear apart weft and warp of grass and rip up ivy runners, I uncover scurrying neighborhoods of pill bugs and millipedes and earwigs and curling earthworms in the damp rich soil, bright yellow snail shells with brown candy-stripes; I disturb spiders of various shapes and sizes from their headstone-ivy webs where they’re neighbors to the letters on the stones, and ladybugs from the nooks and crannies they jewel. Some headstones are held in a woody embrace of tree trunk. Brambles spread even more heartily than the ivy, sending out thick thorny ropes across the ground and plunging pink root tips into the soil that burst into knots of root fiber. We use heavy shears and spades and sweat and blood (or at least pain) to tame these. We’re grappling with life here, not death.
Of course, there is some irony in the role that death (or at least maiming) plays in our task. We’re living beings in a graveyard trying to deal death to eager living plants in order to better remember the deaths of our own. But there’s always more life. It’s easy to see the ever-expanding wave of green as one living being. Knock out a few brambles or uproot a few thistles and Life is none the wiser. We’ve simply made room for more. It’s almost as easy to apply this to ourselves: whether we’re among the sleeping remnants in the graveyard or working in the sun, we’re each a drop in the wave of humanity, or even that same wave of green. The wave of humanity probably won’t always persist on this planet, but that bigger wave will, at least as long as the sun lasts. It’s hard to tell if there’s comfort in this thought—that we’re somehow part of this broader experience, somehow continuing in it—or mostly nihilism. It probably depends on the person thinking it.
The Parish of the Ascension church, a familiar English affair of peaked roof, rose window, and cobblestone walls, keeps humble watch over the burial ground, marking where living souls used to perform their ceremonies for the dead. The burial ground only closed to burials this year, but the church has been defunct for quite a while. Now it’s repurposed as a workshop for the stonecutter who has etched out many of the more recent headstones. Where there used to be pews—including a long narrow gap along the transept that the stonecutter hypothesizes is where the coffin would stand during a funeral—is now a workbench, and the small chapel is cluttered with half-carved pieces of stone and tools and demonstrations of old lettering. The air is frigid, as it was designed to be, he says, to keep the bodies cold—there was no other morgue. Up on a high, deep windowsill is a painted portrait of a woman in the style of the ‘40s or ‘50s. The stonecutter tells me it’s a painting of his aunt, who loved it here. The portrait is propped on top of a dusty box, which contains her ashes.
The individuals in the ground outside were all notable on some level, to someone, but some have wider notoriety than others. I’ve heard the quip more than once that this graveyard holds the record for highest collective IQ, for all the Cambridge dons it contains. Ludwig Wittgenstein, the philosopher (I say “the,” expecting it to hold significance, even though it didn’t particularly for me before I came here), is the most famous resident[2], followed perhaps by several of Charles Darwin’s family members: two sons, two daughters-in-law, and granddaughter. Frances Cornford, née Darwin, was a poet, and the stonecutter put up a poem of hers in stone on the wall:
All Soul's Night My love came back to me Under the November tree Shelterless and dim. He put his hand upon my shoulder He did not think me strange or older Nor I, him.
Some grave borders have sunk partly beneath soil, whether because of the same shifting of ground that causes the headstones to heave—fluctuating moisture, freeze-thaw, flow of roots—or, as I like to imagine, because the burying plants and the creatures among them are making their own soil there over the years. Are the bodies and coffins beneath still recognizable or have they also melted into soil? Are one hundred, two hundred years enough for this? Where is Ludwig Wittgenstein in the life cycle of this lush crust of ground? What does Frances Cornford look like now? Would she think herself strange?
This graveyard was not untouched by war. You can find memorials to pilots and servicemen killed in combat or accidents. In one tree-curtained corner there’s a strange, square concrete structure with rough windows. I’m told it was an anti-tank barrier, relic of the second world war, positioned to slow the possible onslaught of enemies bringing new death. They never came, at least not in that form.
Now, like many English graveyards, this place is a wildlife reserve. We want life here. Our trimming and uprooting are only to keep a touch of human order in it, at least for our moment. We keep the graves visible, slow the overtake of brambles, and leave the wildflowers, the bird and deer habitat, the creeping things and the rich soil. We’re cultivating a haven for us and for them. There’s something about the graveyard—whether we have much to do with this or not—that cradles diversity of life in a way the neighboring fallow field, a virtual monoculture of dandelions, doesn’t.
I don’t mind the chance to ponder death and the meaning of life, and I’m intrigued by the layers of local human history signposted here. But really, it is the contact with the graveyard’s life that I come for. When I inhale the breath of the leaves here, plunge my hands into the chaos of grass and the details of the damp soil, walk in the shade of yews, admire the work of cells rioting for their place in the sun or under the dirt, I feel my place in the wave of life that I’m riding. And I thank God for green things.
[1] My own worldview would suggest this silence is masking something much more, but when I’m in the graveyard, I’m thinking materially, earthily.
[2] The stonecutter, Eric Marland, was approached by the British Wittgenstein Society to restore Wittgenstein’s grave (more details), and he said that doing so on film “while some girls sang plainchant in the background” was one of the more surreal experiences of his life.
Gorgeous writings and photos! I found your topic strangely peaceful, which isn’t what I necessarily expected. Thank you, Anne!
Graveyards are suprising places 🙂 Thank you!