Not throwing a pity party, but I am curious about this.
I lost my older brother when I was ten and both parents when I was twenty-two. Apart from the funeral services, I have never been to the cemetery. I honestly don’t think I am avoiding it (at least consciously), I simply feel no reason to go there. The death of my parents radically changed my life, there has not been a day in the past three years without thoughts about them.
Certainly there is a reason why these places exist, a reason why various religions adopted these burial practices. Maybe some find their visits cathartic, but it seems like empty ritual to me.
I visit my grandmother’s gravesite with my mom, to tend her headstone and I know this would appear a sign of respect to her and please her. I was not close to my grandmother, but the cemetery is a lovely place and I don’t go out of my own need, but to please my mom.
I do not visit graves. If for some it brings comfort, I see nothing wrong with doing so. For me there is nothing special about the grave and indeed, I view graveyards as a morbid practice.
My grandparents on my father’s side both died before I was born, so I never knew them. When I was visiting Phoenix I decided to visit their gravesite (along with the gravesite of an uncle whom I also never knew). I didn’t know much about them but I still found the experience moving.
My father was cremated so I have no gravesite to visit, though I doubt I would go very often if he had one…
I used to visit the graves of my grandmother and of my great-grandparents with some regularity. My entire family went as a group on Easter, Christmas, and on the birthdays of the deceased. We aren’t at all religious, so I suppose it is simply a family tradition. As Cyn mentioned, headstone-tending was always involved.
I admit, we all feel quite a bit of guilt having moved to the other side of the country. Ooops.
The members of my family that have died are all buried in the same cementery. (both great-grandparents, grandfather, aunt and nephew)
We usually visit the graves around their birthdays and leave them flowers. I spend the most time at my nephew’s grave. I always leave him a yellow rose (yellow being his favorite color) and talk to him.
Yaya loves you THIS much, Craiggy. And I miss you.
I visit family gravesites at least once a year, usually on Memorial Day. The women in the family would go to tend the graves. I actually came to enjoy it, as I learned a lot of my family history from the stories my grandmother would tell. Most of the cemeteries we go to are small country ones, with a lot more character than what I think of as city “warehouse” cemeteries. Although I am not so old(48) I have already made plans to be interred in one of them, where I have three generations of relatives, all on my mother’s side. It’s a pretty place, quiet and peaceful.
When I was a teenager I first began the practice of putting a flower on a certain grave that isn’t so far from where I will go. It is that of a young woman named Amanda Owen. She died at the age of 20 in the 1880’s. A carving on the stone shows two clasped hands, and an inscription reads “Amanda, you have gone from me but are not forgotten.” No one ever tended the grave, and there seem to be no other Owens’s in the cemetery. I made up the story for myself that she was a young wife(maybe dead in childbirth) and a grieving husband erected the stone.(That wouod be why it says “me” and not “us”.) But of course his heart healed, he remarried, and is buried elsewhere with the second
wife. Just a fiction, but teenagers can be romantic. So I always put a flower on her grave, to show that someone cares.
My departed relatives are all buried quire far away, so the opportunity is rare for a visit, even if I really wanted to. However, I occasionally walk through a nearby cemetery (it’s as lovely as a park, but with no kids or dogs) and I’m fascinated by the history!
I marvel at headstones that show a woman who lived from 1877 to 1976, or a family grave that has the names of five children, all of whom died before the age of four in the early 1900s. I wonder if these people have been forgotten.
Part of the fascination has to do with the nature of my photography (I photograph ruins – usually industrial ruins).
I do visit the grave of my very first boyfriend. We dated for all of six months when I was 16. He died in a motorcycle accident when he was 23 – typically the idiot, he put a helmet on his head but was stupid enough to be the passenger when he and the motorbike driver were too drunk to walk, let alone ride.
There’s no real emotional attachment. We were bratty teens who mostly enjoyed annoying each other. I never even met his parents. He was their firstborn son, and his little brother really worshipped him as a role model. It’s really hard to lose a child, even an adult child. So a bit before Christmas every year, I like to leave an arrangement on his grave anonymously (sometimes I sign a card to “my first boyfriend”), just so his family feels that he is remembered.
Granted, technically he isremembered, though I mostly think he was a dumbass and for most of our “relationship”, I wanted to smack him. But he is remembered and hopefully his family takes some comfort in knowing that.
Well, I drive past the cemetary that holds my two sets of 3x great grand parents, one set of 2x great, and my parents at least 10 times a week. I’ve got to, there’s no other road out of the cul-de-sac I live on. So I pop in every now and then. Less often as more time passes since their deaths, but still often enough. I expect to get planted there myself one day.
I visit my mother’s grave each year on her birthday. My father goes more often than that, maybe once every couple months.
When her family is visiting from oversea, we take them to the cemetary for a visit.
I find the experience enormously distressing, rather than “comforting”. However, I guess sometimes it’s worth putting oneself in a distressing situation, if only for sake of remembrance.
I don’t really have any family graves to visit. It isn’t part of our trad (on mum’s side) to have gravesites, anyway. Someday, though, I’ll find where two of my grandparents are buried (I know the cemetery, it’s close by, but it’s big) and maybe hunt up where they put my father.
I explore cemeteries quite a bit, hunting up the names of those who helped to buold the community where I live. Coming across the names I now write about, I do stop, and bow my head for a silent moment or two. The memorials are only stone and earth, but they do mean something to me, and the memory of those who have passed on, memories I try to preserve.
In one cemetary, I always say hello to a dear friend of mine, there. I do miss her bright, vibrant presence in my life. It’s almost like coming across her once again, and saying, “Hi, Elsie, how’s it going, love?”
A connecting feeling, in a way. Sort of keeps the soul complete.
I don’t really have any family graves to visit. It isn’t part of our trad (on mum’s side) to have gravesites, anyway. Someday, though, I’ll find where two of my grandparents are buried (I know the cemetery, it’s close by, but it’s big) and maybe hunt up where they put my father.
I explore cemeteries quite a bit, hunting up the names of those who helped to buold the community where I live. Coming across the names I now write about, I do stop, and bow my head for a silent moment or two. The memorials are only stone and earth, but they do mean something to me, and the memory of those who have passed on, memories I try to preserve.
In one cemetary, I always say hello to a dear friend of mine, there. I do miss her bright, vibrant presence in my life. It’s almost like coming across her once again, and saying, “Hi, Elsie, how’s it going, love?”
A connecting feeling, in a way. Sort of keeps the soul complete.
It’s wierd, even though I continue to pay for maintenance of the graves, somehow I feel I would be out of place if I went to see them. Although I have come to terms with their deaths, I think I still feel a bit of “survivor’s guilt.” I don’t relish the idea of pondering this while standing in front of those three headstones. That probably means it is something I should do.
Damn, it is difficult to deal with irrational thoughts in a rational way.
I visit my late wife’s grave every couple of months. She died at age 47, six years ago. My dad’s grave is less than 20 feet away, so I visit it as well. The same cemetary also holds two uncles, three cousins, an aunt, a grandfather and both his wives. (he was a widower twice).
On Memorial Day, I help my mother and aunt make up bouquets for seventeen relatives in three different cemetaries, as far back as my great-grandparents who came west a century ago. For most of them, we are the only ones bringing flowers.
I was not interested in such things years ago, but now it brings some comfort and continuity to me. I will probably continue the practice on my own once my mother and aunt are gone.
I am utterly unsentimental about cemeteries. I visited my father’s masoleum once, just to see what it looked like. After the initial surprise of seeing his name on the wall, I felt no emotional connection to the site. Probably because the place had nothing to do with him while he was alive. It was just a warehouse for the dead.
If I want to think of my father, I can do it any place, any time. Visiting my parents’ home will bring back memories. So does looking at old photographs.
But going to an unfamiliar place where his body lies rotting behind a wall isn’t for me.
None of the deceased members of my family are within driving (or even reasonable flying) distance of me, so not my own family, no.
Every New Year’s, however, I go with my wife and her mother to the grave of my father-in-law. We wash it, light some incense sticks in it, and my MIL leaves an open can of black coffee on it (this is actually kind of common. Many of the other graves have cans of beer, sake or whatever the deceased enjoyed drinking, set on them).
My grandmother’s house backs onto a convent and large Catholic cemetary, with just a short walk through a field in between. My grandfather, who died when I was 2, is buried on the top of the hill behind the house. As children, my siblings and cousins and I used to play in the cemetary all the time. We would often visit his grave to put flowers on it and introduce ourselves (the younger kids had been born after his death) and tell him what was going on in the family.
Grandma is up there now too, as of 1996. On the night after her funeral, the family had a sort of wake in the back yard and, one by one or in small groups, went up the hill to sit by the new grave–to talk about her, or cry, or just sit there. I know that sounds rather creepy, but I remember it being one of the more peaceful and cathartic moments of that sad week.
I haven’t been back to the old house since Grandma’s death but I assume I’ll visit the cemetary the next time I do. Aside from being where my grandparents are buried, it’s so much a part of my childhood and my memories of that place.
I visit my grandfather’s grave once or twice a year. I find it really comforting. When I was a kid, I thought the cemetery was disturbing, but now I just find it very calm and peaceful.
I’ve been thinking about this subject a lot lately. My sister in law died three weeks ago, at the age of 42. Both her parents are still alive. They’ve buried their son (suicide) and grandson (motorcycle accident) at the same cemetery. These were the three youngest that my MIL raised, even though they weren’t all her birth children. In addition, her parents are there, as well as my FIL’s brother (and Mother, I think).These people aren’t religious, but they are really big on cemeteries. They all have their own thing, but I’ve never seen a family so big on this ritual.
MIL goes for every occasion – all holidays, birthdays, anniversaries, etc. She buys blankets of pine boughs to put over their graves in the winter. They tend the gravesites. All fairly normal. Then there’s the parents of the dead grandson. The dad spends two or three lunch hours a week there. They bought a marble bench with an inscription so they can sit while they’re there. (Oh, and you can cremate other people and stash their ashes in the legs of the bench if you so desire.)
A bunch of the family are runners. They run 9 miles (one way) to the gravesites. They raise hell at the office of the cemetery if the graves look messy.
My mom will be dead five years this June. I went to her grave to put her ashes in. I don’t believe I’ll ever go back. Like others here, I have many fond memories of her and don’t have any desire or need to visit the gravesite. I have photographs and family members to talk about her with. The gravesite is a depressing place when it involves people I know. On the other hand, I love to look at the graves of strangers. I like to try to imagine their lives or how they died. I’ve always wanted to live next to a graveyard…there’s something very cool about it.