How Often Do You Visit the Graves of Close Family?

I never do simply because I see little point in placing flowers, candles, teddy bears or anything else above rotting boxes containing skeletons and body parts.

However I do like visiting really old graveyards whenever I get the chance just to read the gravestones and enjoy the silence and tranquility found there..


IL CIMITERO ACATTOLICO DI ROMA // ROME, ITALY.

 

I do love old graveyards. They are fascinating.
I will take some photos for you, and post them here.

 

Video: Margorie McCall who ‘lived once and was buried twice'.

 

Bit of a tall Irish tail that has no doubt been told and retold in pubs over a pint or ten of Guiness!

 

We have a similar grave near me in Christchurch in Dorset UK.

 

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Generally just once a year.

And speaking of old cemeteries, our oldest dates back to 1660

 

My family members were crisped (cremated) and the ashes spread all over the garden of remembrance, therefore there are no graves to visit, so in answer to the question - NEVER !!!

 

A narrow cave in a gorge in Somerset has been identified as the oldest cemetery in Britain, used by generations of people from one area in the Mendips just after the last ice age, 10,000 years ago.

Scientific tests, released yesterday, showed it had been sealed and abandoned more than 6,000 years before the first stone of the pyramids of Egypt was laid. The site, Aveline's Hole, is unique in Britain and earlier than anything similar on mainland Europe.

According to legend it was found in 1797 by two boys so determined to catch the rabbit they were chasing, that they took a pickaxe to the hole in the rock it escaped through and found a cavern full of skeletons.

Some accounts say that up to 100 skeletons were found neatly laid out in rows but tourists and amateur archaeologists flocked to the site, and the bones were scattered. Hundreds were stored at Bristol University but destroyed by a bomb during the second world war. Fragments survived there and in other museum collections.

Peter Marshall of English Heritage's scientific dating service, which commissioned the first comprehensive tests on the bones, said the results were remarkable. "People in early Mesolithic Britain were creating what we can recognise as a cemetery thousands of years earlier than has previously been thought. Although late Mesolithic cemeteries have been found on the continent, none have been recognised over here," he said.

The tests showed that the men, women and children buried in the cave were small and strong and ate meat. They rarely lived to be older than 50 and were tormented with bad teeth, rheumatic pains and osteoarthritis.

 

Ten Thousand years and things haven't changed all that much !!!

 

You may be more right, than you can imagine.

We know from previous remains dating back 10,000 year ago that the inhabitants of Great Britain still hadn’t acquired the gene for white skin

Not to put too strong of a political edge on the subject but I’m thinking Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Ahmaud Arbery.....

 

Skin pigmentation is not something I unduly worry about !!!

 

I know but it is interesting and topical.

 

Aveline's hole, I fell down that bloody thing one night, serve me right for not carrying a torch with me, lol

As to visiting graves, I'm sad to say that I only visit one, the one my brother is buried in, it also has my mothers ashes in it. I go two or three times a year, not necessarily at times like birthdays or Christmas, I just go when I feel the need, as daft as it may sound I went up there a couple of months ago to 'have a chat with our kid', we were not particularly close, he was eight years younger than me and took his own life in his thirties, we were not close in that we didn't speak to each other every week, sometimes it would be months before we met up, but if there was any major trouble we were there for each other, a bit like the musketeers,
I will never forget when I heard he'd died, apparently he was having some major shit in his life, his world had just fallen apart, sadly he couldn't get hold of me and he did what he did, I suppose he felt it was what he had to do, I remember the last time I saw him, I was going out with this girl and introduced him to her cousin, we'd all been for a drink and back at my girlfriends house we were all arsing about, like you do. Her cousin was proper ticklish and our kid kept squeezing her waist from behind, it made her jump and giggle, then he'd poke her gently in the ribs, more laughter. He'd been doing this for a few minutes when he spotted a box of Mr Kiplings Lemon Slices, he squeezed her prodded her and then picked up the lemon slices and offered them around, I can hear him now, "squidge, prod, lemon slice" he said and we all fell about laughing, it was hilarious at the time, looking back it seems so bloody stupid, I've never eaten a lemon slice since!
I remember his 21st birthday, he'd been out and there was some trouble at home and he ended up badly cutting his wrist in a fight, he was bleeding like crazy and wandered off. I went to look for him but couldn't find him, but what I did find was a mate of mine, a copper, now our kid didn't know everything about me, he certainly didn't know how good my relationship with the local police was, lol. Anyway my mate said he'd find him and get him sorted, so I drove back home, about 2 hours later the police turned up at our house, they'd got our kid in the car, covered in blood, apparently he'd refused to go to hospital, so they'd arrested him, that's when it all got really funny, they put him in a car and instead of taking him to the cells they brought him to my house, he promptly passed out on the couch and while he was asleep I looked at the wound, it was bad, very bad. I applied some butterfly stitches and bandaged it, he'd go to hospital in the morning when he was sober.
He woke up the following morning and the first thing he saw was me, sat in a chair, "what are you doing in the cell?" he asked, "we're not in a cell, we're at my house" I replied, he was proper confused, "ok, what happened? I was walking along and a copper stopped me, how did he know my name, why did he arrest me, and how the hell did I end up here?" he asked I just smiled, "well our kid, I guess you've just found out something else you didn't know about me then, I had them looking for you, I had you 'arrested' and you were released into my custody" I replied, "yeah ok, but how did I get here then, it's miles from where they picked me up!" he asked, even more confused, "ahh well, you see they were good enough to deliver you as well, since I am so well known" I replied, he was even more confused by now. It became a talking point for several years afterwards and he never really worked it all out, we didn't get on as kids, him being 8 years younger than me, in fact we didn't always get on as adults, but when shit hit fan, we were there for each other, I remember us going to sort out some shit for another relative and as we approached the incident our kid turned my car stereo up full blast, wound down the windows and began playing the A team theme, what a nutter!
RIP Andy, we had some great laughs, I'll never forget you, I'll be up soon to have a little 'chat' at the grave.

 

i can't really afford to travel to where they are.
as long as i can carry the ghosts of everyone i've ever met in my head, if they want some kind of memorial i guess that's up to them.

and i'll end up, my bones, where ever the government, whatever it feels like doing with them.
really when the body ceases to function, there's no reason i know of, to assume any sort of remaining connection, to whatever awareness may once have occupied it.

the stones are interesting as artifacts of human creation. and planting remains next to each other like that, is i suppose, a sanitary way of dealing with them.
so yah i was at the grave side when my mom was planted, but i wasn't able to make to where my dad was. i know its somewhere in san bruno, but i've never been to it.

my mom is in the one near valajo. they're both military cemitaries. they weren't able to be burried next to each other because my mom lived almost 20 years more then he did,
so by the time it was her turn, the one where my dad's ashes, there just wasn't any more room.

my dad really wanted neptune society instead, but the government had that shut down a the time.

so anyway, i've never lived nor wanted to, anywhere close enough to either site to just be able to walk over there.
and my wife, her brother's spirited away her remains, to i have no idea where or what they did with them.

i go to grave yards once in a while, i like quiet places, and its nice the memorials, people leave decorations and all that,
but its never really been part of my personal perspective.

i've never been good at knowing what people want. and if their/our awareness somehow continues somewhere else, then they're living their new lives or para-lives or whatever you want to call it, somewhere else, maybe each born again on different worlds from each other, with no real reason to remember or be concerned about, whatever they may have left behind here.

 

My family is pretty good about it. Though I never met my great uncle Romeo, and I don't think my mother did either, we put flowers on his grave sometimes. For my grandparents, we put out flowers every so often... & for military oriented holidays my family always goes out to my grandpas grave site. He served in WWII and was wounded in battle.

Cemeteries are really neat places. I like them and the feelings I have when I visit. Death is the end of life, but memories can live on. & it's the epic that we remember. I remember how my grandpa worked. For my whole life, he was retired; or at least as far back as I can remember. But he always fixed up the house, or did something in the yard. The tradition lives on with my mother and father. They tinker in the garden or the backyard incessantly.

& grandpa loved to read! He had a very thoroughly stocked bookshelf. Louis L'Amour (RIP - 1988) was one of his favorites. But it wasn't all adventure novels. I remember this one book being HUGE! - "Patton"... He read war documentaries, and, of course, the paper. He would read aloud to my grandma working in the kitchen when I was a little boy.

As I got older, I became addicted to drugs. I never hung out with them when I was a teenager, and now I miss them. I know I missed out on some cool years and wasn't a very good grandson when they passed away, may they rest in peace. But now I have warm memories of the way they were. & we live in their old house that my grandpa built in the 1950s.

 

oddly enough, cemitaries don't really make me think about death, but they do sometimes make me curious about the histories and lives experienced by the people who's names i see on the stones.
other then my mom's sisters and their families, i've never met any of my grans other then my mom's mom. no idea where any of them are buried. i grew up west coast, and they were all east coast when i was doing so.