A compromise

I was not able to go to work today. The last few days have been so hard on me that I find myself almost unable to even make the trip to another room of the house. I'm heavy, sore and wishing it were another season entirely since the only thing I feel capable of doing is resting under a blanket on the couch. As the sun has come out shining this afternoon this has kind of spoiled my plans.

I desperately did not feel like going for a walk, though I know I had to. I am really concerned with being able to say that I am trying my absolute best at the moment, and that if I fall, I have done everything I can to prevent it. I don't want anyone to think that I am weak or that I have given up. I have never battled so hard against myself in my entire life. So, instead of just not going for a walk, I made a compromise with my morbid brain. I would go for a walk so long as I walked around the cemetery near here.

That might sound weird, but I don't see why it has to be. Cemeteries are public spaces like any other, and in fact that are very interesting public places as they are full of stories. When you are a very sensitive person like me you can pick up on the moods and feelings of a place and, if you know how to listen, they tell you things.

I'll admit that my reason for wanting to go was to look for children's graves. Ok, maybe that is a bit problematic, but surely not that unusual? I certainly wasn't the only one there. There were a few people even kissing their loved one's graves. I only found one grave of a baby, though - a little girl I felt sad for as her little grave was surrounded by these huge, imposing mausoleums housing really old people whose stories probably bored her to tears and made her wish there really was still a limbo where she could at least be surrounded by people her own age.

Most of the graves from the past century were of Greek or Eastern European people who had died in very old age. They mostly all had photos of the deceased and were definitely intended to be a physical display of how much the person was loved and respected. I wanted to take some photos of the more elaborate ones, but it felt a bit inappropriate when there were other people around. Hell, maybe it is inappropriate all the time, but I would have done it anyway if I were the only one there!

I got the unavoidable impression that bigger was better, and this kind of disturbed me as I know how much those big lumps of carved stone cost. How much of that money could have gone towards researching cures for the things that killed those people?

I know that many cultures grieve differently, though. I don't really know how we Australians do it, I only know what I have observed over the last couple of months as I've been thinking of it. It seems that we are much more comfortable with cremation for one thing. Perhaps we are comforted by keeping the remains of our loved one's nearby, or scattered in a place we know they loved. I don't think we are big on ritual. We don't want to go and sit in a cemetery for hours every weekend to remember our loved one, and I think that we are move private in our grieving than at any other time in our history.

As a scholar of nineteenth century literature and history, I know quite a bit about the mourning practices of the Victorians, and for them mourning was a very public event. This had a lot to do with the fact that Queen Victoria mourned so visibly and for so long after the death of her husband. Her constituents, especially those from the upper classes, began to ascribe to very distinct rules about what clothes you could wear and for how long you had to wear them, for example. Certain colours and fabrics came to represent how much time had elapsed since the death - you can read a little summary of these customs here or here. Mourning portraits and mourning jewellery were also very popular.

This practice of wearing special jewellery is perhaps one of the few to survive into our age - there are now quite a few companies that specialise in the manufacture of lockets which can hold a portion of cremation ashes as well as a photo keepsake. I have been thinking of having one made for myself.

Though I would not wish to be marked entirely by my bereavement, and to have my choice of expression limited to what social conventions dictate, I have spent a lot of time thinking about how invisible I feel because there is no outward way to mark what I have experienced. I almost feel like I need a battle scar.

In the days immediately after Max's birth and death I was a woman who had just had a baby, except I had no evidence of that baby when I went down the street like all the other new mothers I saw did. I desperately wanted people to know and acknowledge that I was also a mother. This was horrible. I wanted everyone to know. I still do. I sometimes wished there was a sign that I could wear around my neck so that people would ask me about my little boy and want to talk about him, or so that they might tread more carefully when they saw me coming. Would impatient drivers still have honked me at the traffic lights when I took too long to cross if I was kitted out on mourning garb? Well, maybe they would if they were bastards, but if they were ordinary people who just didn't know any better maybe they'd have been more understanding.

I don't find thinking about death in these ways to be morbid or distressing. I am actually far more comfortable talking about death at the moment than I am talking about the petty concerns of the living. I've now seen it and touched it, and a result I have rid myself of much of its fear and mystery.