The inescapable fact of life

I love to sit on a bench in graveyard. Or take a slow walk around reading the details of people and their deeds, all spoken for by a few words and dates on a stone resting perpendicular to the ground. It’s a simple place. Life is shaved back to a couple of components. There are the living – and nearly always that is just me, no one else seems to be in the graveyards I go to – and the dead. The dead are resting and rotting beneath my feet. They don’t do much else.

The graveyard is also a thorough leveller. Everyone is laid down horizontally in the earth. There is no distinction in extinction permitted here. A grander stone above your head cannot hide that you are in the ground just like everyone else. We have all either already arrived in the soil or are en route; getting closer each and every day.

Of course when you pause in a cemetery memories of those you have lost will arise about and within you. I understand how it may seem to be an ego-directed exercise in self-saddening to visit when there is no duty to. But the graveyard’s quiet blend of simplicity and equality means it is easier for your mind to see how it is that we all live the same way: amongst loss and grief for those we held dear. The separation between you and others reduces in a graveyard. It becomes a place in which to cultivate compassion for all people. This is us, laid out in lines. Our dates and names slowly fading inexorably to illegibility. Our fate no different in any way at all from our neighbour’s.

So come join me on the wooden bench in the burial ground and feel your love for your fellow beings increase as you sit amongst the inescapable fact of death.