Exactly. What is in that grave is the most dead, most "finished’ part of a loved one. The living parts, pictures and memories and maybe an afterlife of some kind, are more important, and I feel putting too much importance on a gravesite negates that.
I have never visited a grave of someone I know. I don’t mind visiting cemetaries in themselves, though. They can be quite peaceful.
I never knew where my grandfather was buried until my mother died. Not having anywhere else to put her and needing someplace (she died suddenly and unexpectedly), she was buried next to my grandfather. And so I learned where he was.
I went to visit the graves a few times in the year after Mom died. Then it got less and less. Maybe I visited once a year. Then it got to once very two or three years. Then I moved out of the city where the cemetery is. Even though I’ve been back a few times since leaving town, I don’t visit the graves. I probably haven’t been there in about ten years.
I do believe in an afterlife and now I’m worried. Will my Mom be there, nagging as she often did, “You never called, you never came by…”? 
I’ve posted about this before somewhere around here. I never go (my mom’s situation is much like Dinsdale’s – cremation and ashes in the plot). I never go.
My in-laws are cemetery groupies. They go ALL the time. They picnic, spend tons of money on benches, eternal flames, talk to the headstone, visit all the graves every time…in packs of two to six.
I prefer to remember my mom with photos and conversation. The grave means almost nothing to me.
My father’s ashes are buried in the family plot along with his parents, in a lovely little cemetary that is about 200 miles from where I’m currently living. The cemetary is maintained by the local council and as we were unable to visit on anything like a regular basis, my mother pays the council for the upkeep of the family graves.
They don’t charge very much but it covers the cost of mowing the grass in the whole of the cemetary, tidying the borders etc and allows for the planting of six flowers on each grave twice a year. It might not sound like much but it makes my mum feel better because she knows the graves will look neat and tidy, and it is a salve to her conscience because she’s unable to visit very often.
Last year her brother passed away and was buried beside his wife in a cemetary even further away from us. We’ve been down there for the funeral, once afterwards when the headstone was put up, once again when the kerbstones were added, and once more to put a small display of silk flowers on each grave. Mum will probably visit at least once a year, despite the fact the cemetary’s a longer distance to travel it’s actually an easier journey for her by train.
She has already sorted out her funeral plans and has told me that when she’s gone, she doesn’t want me to feel obliged to visit her grave at all. Just as long as I remember the good times, that will be enough for her.
I visited my father’s mausoleum once. I was momentarily startled to turn a corner and see his name spelled out in gilded letters on the wall, in a place he had never visited, and among a room full of fellow-dead strangers. After that, I felt nothing. I decided that if I wanted to remember my father, I could pretty well do it wherever my mind was, and I didn’t need to stand in a place foreign to his life and mine to do it.
That having been said, I still like some cemeteries for their picturesque qualities, especially the older ones with all the differently shaped monuments — the obelisks, the statues, the big family head stone with its outlying grave stones of individual members, all the varieties of trees. Today’s cemeteries are boring, unfortunately. To make the grounds easier to maintain, grave stones are set flush with the ground instead of upright, and trees, with all their pesky leaves dropping and the roots obtruding into the burial lots, are kept to the perimeters of the grounds.
P.S. cemet-E-ry, no “a”.
I went to my mom’s grave once to see the headstone when it had been installed. My family were not grave-visitors, nor am I. I’m glad in that I didn’t see most of my relatives dead as well.
I do belive that our essence continues without the shell - there’s no reason for me to go visit the dirt over an empty shell in a box.
Me, I’ll be cremated and attached to a firework.
Another term for “marker” is headstone. Tho I’m sure there are exceptions, common placement is at the “head” of the grave. If you are standing in front of the marker reading it, you are right on top of the dear departed (or at least where they used to be. Presuming they were planted the right way…)
I don’t. One of my best friends killed himself two years ago, and I still haven’t gone. I don’t know if I ever will. Whatever’s left in that grave isn’t something that will benefit by my visiting. It won’t help me remember his voice better, won’t make him somehow feel better, won’t do anything except tear me up. I tried, once, about nine months after, and I couldn’t even make it to his grave, I was crying so hard.
I believe in an afterlife. I don’t believe that it’s necessary to visit gravesites. I’m on the record as Not Giving A Damn ™ about what happens to me after I take my last breath. . .it’s just not a big deal to me.
Oops. Thanks. Isn’t it odd how there are some words that you just always misspell? I’ll try to remember this one. Please pour yourself a favorite drink as a reward for fighting this individual’s ignorance in this instance.
My own family has pretty much stopped visiting graves. My grandfather is dead 30 years-I haven’t been there in over 10 years. I mean, he (in whatever form he exists in now) isn’t there. I sometimes walk in an old cemetary, and see graves from 250 years ago. I wonder who these people were, what their lives were like. But other than that, it is over for them.
My wife and I visit our children’s graves every few months, usually on their birthdays. We keep the graves clean, put in new flowers or decorations and talk to each other and them about what might have been had they lived. It hurts but is healing.
My dad was cremated and his marker is just a few miles away. We go sometimes on holidays or his birthday. We will go for sure on Memorial Day because they will put a flag there and we want to photograph it.
My mother died in August. Aside from visits there for estate related reasons (seeing if the marker’s there and correct, dropping by the grave when picking up papers from the funeral home a block away, etc.) I’ve been to her grave about three times, each time as a sort of impulse turn when I was in the general vicinity and had time to kill. I had a volatile but close relationship with my mother and I miss her terribly, but I get absolutely no sense of connection to her whatsoever at the grave.
My father’s buried 40 miles away and I usually drop in on the cemetery when I’m up that way but that’s not often at all. Thereagain I get no sense of connection. In fact it freaks me out when I think of the fact that the people I knew and loved/loathed/was close to are in overpriced boxes a few feet under the ground, some probably bones in nice backless outfits and others still having some decayed sick resemblance to the face and body I knew, all at a cost of thousands and all for absolutely no reason whatever.
I always leave coins on graves, incidentally, a combination of the Jewish custom of leaving a rock and the pennies tossed on Ben Franklin’s grave that fascinated me when I was a kid in Philadelphia for the Bicentennial.
Relevant if selfreferential anecdote: My great-grandparents had 15 children, all of whom lived to adulthood and many of whom had large families of their own. They both died in the 1950s and their youngest few kids have only died in the last decade (all very old admittedly). Because their cemetery was only 1/10th of a mile off a road I used to drive down several times per month I used to stop there occasionally, sometimes for genealogy research and sometimes because it was a good place to pee on a very long road without public restrooms.
It was very obvious the graves hadn’t been tended or visited in quite some while other than by the perpetual care staff. I never once saw anybody there, the tire tracks on the dirt road were usually old, the flowers in the vase were faded and obviously had been for years, no stones or “trinkets” save for the ones I left, weeds growing, etc… This couple has at least a few dozen grandkids/great-grandkids and other friends/relatives still alive who remember them well and they probably have 1000 descendants within 30 miles (when my great grandmother died in the late 1950s she already had more than 120 living descendants) and clearly their graves don’t bring comfort or connection. It was another realization of just how silly and barbaric a leftover practice graves are.
Let me add to this that I do visit places associated with the people I love who are dead. I’m also building a “family shrine”- a cabinet with photographs and “relics” of these people (my father’s glasses, my grandfather’s pocket knife, etc.) in my house because photographs and personal possessions do give me sense of connection.
That’s exactly how I feel. The gravesite is so not about my mom. My connection is in her kitchen and in conversation with my dad and the sibs and my son. The grave casts a false finality over her existence that isn’t there as long as someone still remembers her.
Mom’s dead almost 12 years. She really screwed me over, in ways I only recently learned about. I hardly ever visit. She’s buried next to Dad, who’s gone almost 33 years. I don’t remember him. I used to visit all the time before Mom died.
Mom instructed me not to visit her resting place, but to burn a candle on the mantle when I thought of her. I scattered her ashes on Vestry Hill at a Girl Scout camp in Ohio. If I’m aboard a boat in Tampa Bay, I might piss over the side where my dad’s ashes are scattered, blast his soul.
That is interesting. Reading this thread, I get the impression that graves are only meaningful when one has no other means of remembering the departed.
Visiting the grave of my parents, if they died, would have no meaning for me whatsoever; I’d much rather prefer the other ways to remember them, mentioned by other posters, such as talking or writing about them/to them, pictures, Sampiro’s shrines, or visiting places that had meaning. I can add to those means the creating of places that have meaning: I have recently made a workshop in my new home, not because I plan to use it often, but because my dad’s workshop was the place I had the best times with him and I plan to pass that workshop-atmosphere over to any children I might have.
Now, if it were my great-great great grandparents, I’d prefer to read letters or see pictures, but failing all that, I’d like it if there was a grave I could visit. Just once, though, so I don’t plan to invest in a grave my great-great grandchildren might enjoy visiting, if it is just for a one time.
As Sampiro said, there’s an funeral industry that is guilty of selling overpriced crap to people in a state of grief, uncertainty and a wish to do right to people who are really beyond doing right by. Perhaps that’s why the funeral business has such a bad name.