of grave concern

I've always enjoyed visiting cemeteries, or wandering around them I should say. No one near and dear to me has ever been buried in a cemetery, we're all about cremation in my gang, so I have never had a destination grave that I could deliver flowers to, a headstone that I could reflect silently beside; one that records the barest details of a loved one's life. My forebears' ashes float out at sea or, rather, feed the fish at the bottom of the ocean.

Maybe that's why I enjoy a stroll through a graveyard, I'm not emotionally invested. I am always intrigued though; by the choice of marker (stone, granite, cross, statue, urn), how well it's tended (fresh/wilted flowers, plastic ornaments, polished marble), the occupant's names that always seem to conjure Victorian maiden aunts, and Edwardian railway porters, and of course those all important bookend dates (enviably distant cousins, or woefully close siblings) that both start and finish all of our stories.

My favourite cemetery, if you'll allow me, is Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. It is vast (110 acres) with over 70,000 graves. It welcomes over 3.5 million visitors a year. These figures come courtesy of Wikipedia, btw, in case you think I'm freakishly learned about the place. It would be easy to spend a whole day wandering around its avenues, or boulevards, lined with mausoleums, chapels, crypts, and sepulchres. The scale and architecture of some of these buildings is staggering, this is the place to come if you like a gothic grave marker. You'll stand blinking in awe at the sheer size, grandeur, and beauty of the angels (and other statuary) guarding the doorways to some of the family tombs (unless you're a Dr Who fan, perhaps), but the real reason you are here is to see the graves of the famous people who have been laid to rest, cheek by jowl alongside the many lesser known inhabitants of the city.

If there is a graveyard anywhere else in the world with a more extraordinarily talented bunch of famous folk buried in it, then I'd like to hear about it. It is possible to buy a map as you enter Père Lachaise that marks the graves of all its well known residents, and I'd recommend that you shell out the few Euros to buy one. It's an investment that will save you hours of searching because not all the gravestones of these internationally renowned folk are as visually arresting as you might imagine. So who could you show your respects to during your visit? Jim Morrison, Edith Piaf, Oscar Wilde, Simone Signoret and Yves Montand (together in death, as in life), Sarah Bernhardt, Isadora Duncan, Maria Callas, Marcel Marceau, Colette, Georges Bizet, Richard Wright, René Lalique, Modigliani, Pissarro, Seurat, Gertrude Stein (beside her lover) Alice B. Toklas, Frederic Chopin, Marcel Proust, Honore De Balzac, Molière. These are some of the graves that I sought out, but the list goes on...and you can see more names listed here, Père Lachaise Cemetery courtesy of the Paris Discovery Guide.

Some people might think that a guided tour of a cemetery is just about as disrespectful as it gets (and you can actually book yourself onto a guided tour if you're not one of those people), but when I visit a graveyard I'm always conscious of the fact that each grave belongs to someone's loved one, and I treat them all with respect. I'm just curious. Most people would admit to a fascination with death, be it a morbid curiosity, a wild fear, or a calm acceptance. Many would put their hands up to an interest in the lives of the famous too. Not the current, prurient so-called-celebrity culture of today, but a genuine interest in the lives of cultural titans of the past. Where else but in Père Lachaise would I get to spend a few quiet moments in the company of Oscar Wilde, or Edith Piaf?   

The grave, in the photo below, is in a cemetery local to where I live. It's a lovely place, that wraps around a beautiful church, and is, itself, girded about by an old flint wall. It is bisected by two paths that meet, and cross, outside the church door (a deliberate design feature, I suppose), just beyond the large beds of herbs that form the physic garden. This cemetery is as peaceful as they come, despite being surrounded by roads, and the graves are dotted about in the shade of large oak and yew trees, the roots of which have burst through, and split open a couple of old graves, toppling the headstones. There are a few formal flowerbeds at one entrance to the cemetery that always provide a splash of colour, but it's the wildflowers seeding themselves, growing in profusion, attracting a huge diversity of bees, butterflies, insects, and songbirds, that guarantees the graveyard is always full of life, and also that those graves which no longer receive any visitors, because their occupants have passed beyond living memory, are still blessed with the gift of flowers. 

Photo is the author's own