Memories Buried in Cemeteries
Where I first learned to feel at home
I write this with an ache in my shoulders, not just from yesterday’s rough physio appointment, but from the slow uncoiling of a spasm in my brain that had long forgotten this part of myself, a self that lives somewhere quieter than this faulty body carrying it. My love for cemeteries, wherever I go.
It all started when my grandfather passed away. I was in 5th grade. I was not his favourite grandchild, and I never knew what most people mean when they talk about grandparents’ love. My parents loved me fiercely, and that was enough, but that was all there was. So naturally, I was not very sad. I was, if anything, quietly thrilled, because it meant I got to spend the whole day unsupervised. The funeral service was held in a small chapel tucked into a vast, aching, beautiful cemetery, full of remains from the colonial past.
I wandered the entire grounds, past graves of children, the young, and the old, all resting side by side. While the adults were consumed by the ceremonies, young me was enjoying my new-found freedom and silence, my imagination running wild with every tomb I passed. I built stories out of some. I passed deep sighs on others. It gave me a calm I had been waiting for. Those tombs never once judged me for skin a little darker than my sister’s or my mother’s. They never told me I needed to be more outgoing to be worth loving. Perhaps that’s what the dead already knew, that none of it, the skin, the face, the performance to be liked, really mattered.
Somewhere in that wandering, I fell in love with cemeteries. It was an assurance that ultimately we will rest and it will be beautiful. I started writing poems on them, started showing up to every ceremony I could, just to walk through that silence again. I was never quite fond of the crowds on All Souls’ Day, every November 2nd, but I still loved the candles, the incense, the roses, and the jasmine flowers, that smell settling around me like something holy.
After many years, caught up in the hustle of adult life, I naturally stopped thinking about them. When I came to Australia, cemeteries were the furthest thing from my mind. Not until we moved closer to one, and around that same time, a puppy came into my life. He was a working breed, all muscle and restlessness, so we had to find him vast open spaces to walk and tire him out before he took his frustration out on our furniture. That’s how we found this cemetery. A lawn cemetery, beautifully kept, flowers and trees everywhere, almost like a park, except the company here is quieter.
I took my puppy there every single day, and slowly I got my space back, my solitude back, my muscle memory on love for the graves back. Among other things Bhuma and I also shared the love for cemeteries.
Dogs,I feel, are not so different from the dead. They don’t ask you to be prettier, or nicer, or different than you already are. Bhuma never once judged me, not for the days I couldn’t play or take him out, not for the hard seven months of chemo I chose for him. He simply stayed silently with me, the way those graves once did, loving me compeletely, no matter what. May be that’s why he understood this place instantly. He had always spoken that language.
After he passed, I scattered his ashes into the lake, in that same lawn cemetery he knew so well. I still visit often, to talk to him, to pray for him, and sometimes a bird stays near me a little too long , and I let myself believe it’s him, stopping by just to check on me.
The cemetery has grown into something more than the place I once ran to for solitude, back when I was just a child looking for stories among the graves. It was the first home I ever found for myself, long before I understood what that word meant. Now that Bhuma has become part of its story too, I realise he became a second version of that same home, quieter, warmer, built from the same silence.