Burial - Michael Waterhouse contemplates our gravest concerns
Things have started to look up for death. This year, there have been new books on burial "the green way" and on how to have a good death. A series of fly-on-the-wall documentaries shot in a hospice will soon be on our television screens and, for the very committed, there's an MA course on Death and Society at the University of Reading. We could be forgiven for thinking that people are developing a taste for the subject.
Not to be left out, the Museum of London has mounted a small but fascinating exhibition entitled "Grave Concerns: the disposal of London's dead". The peg is the growing recognition that London is quickly exhausting its burial space. Every year, 60,000 Londoners die and, as things stand, the capital's cemeteries have room for bodies for only seven more years. Grim as this sounds, the situation is nowhere near as bad as that facing Lanjaron, a small town outside Granada in Spain, where the solitary cemetery has just six plots left and the mayor has apparently declared it illegal to die.
"Grave Concerns" offers a more modest proposal: we may have to consider reusing graves. Since the mid-1970s, people have been able to "own" their plots for a maximum of 100 years; this lease arrangement implicitly acknowledges the principle of reuse, but it has never been acted upon. This exhibition, in its quiet way, asks what all the fuss is about. Regardless of our squeamish resistance to disturbing our loved ones, reuse, if well managed, need not pose a threat to public health.
The exhibition is an eclectic assortment of documents and archaeological finds which, at first glance, do not seem to have much in common, other than reminding us of the sombre truth that death comes to us all, as it has in all ages. Well worth looking at are the grave goods from the Roman cemetery at Spitalfields, which include some fine glassware and jet jewellery. There are also Bronze Age beakers, Stuart mourning rings and various cremation urns, ancient and modern. But at the centre of the exhibition space, confronting you as you walk in, is a large, self-assembly cardboard coffin. Only then does it click: together, these diverse items encapsulate the arguments that have shadowed funerals throughout history. Who are they for - the living or the dead? What is the function of the graveyard? Who decides what happens at a funeral?
People have never been able to agree on the answers. The Romans forbade burial within the city walls to prevent contamination of the inhabitants. Once Christianity had become established, the churches became responsible for funerals, and bodies were buried in their churchyards, in the midst of the living. While cremation was the usual means of disposal in the Bronze Age, for Christians it was incompatible with the physical resurrection, and was therefore condemned until well into the 20th century. This most important of rites of passage has always been fraught with contradiction, and as funerals have become more elaborate and expensive, so it has been less and less credible that we perform this rite for the dead. Funerals are clearly for the living. As the veteran American funeral director Thomas Lynch puts it so bluntly, "the dead don't care".
To the pre-Reformation world, that notion would have been unintelligible and sacrilegious. The community of the faithful would pray that the deceased's time in purgatory be short. They hoped, through prayer and song, to improve the soul's afterlife, to influence God's judgement. (One exhibit illustrates the point: a 14th-century papal seal, which grieving relatives had placed in the corpse's hand to petition God for fewer days of suffering.) With the absence of purgatory after the Reformation, mourners lost the opportunity to do anything useful for the dead, and they began to think more about their own loss. They took to wearing mourning rings left them by their loved ones, vignettes of skeletons or burial urns that were a constant reminder of the departed and of their continuing grief. They also began to question the etiquette of funerals and, in particular, the eschewal of any display of personal anguish.
The discrepancy between normative tradition and the needs of mourners is a problem we have had with funerals for a long time. Nowadays, many people find funerals impersonal and jejune affairs. They particularly dislike the production-line arrangements at crematoria, the badly recorded hymns and the "rota vicars" who haven't a clue who the deceased was. This is chiefly attributable to the decline of religious faith in Britain and the consequent absence of a shared language of funerary ritual. Without belief, people feel remote from the liturgy at the same time as they have a deep yearning to mark the event. Not surprising, then, that alternative funeral companies have proved so popular. They offer a cheaper service but, more significantly, a chance to determine exactly what happens.
As the graveyards fill up and the grass starts to grow, we are left asking what should be done with these huge, romantic spaces. The danger is that they will be vandalised and fall into decay; in fact, one incidental, if ironic, pleasure of "Grave Concerns" is the set of photographs by Agustin Amate Bonachera of toppled plinths and headless angels taken in Victorian cemeteries across London. Some of these graveyards have been turned into parks, where - according to the exhibition's curators - people go on pilgrimage, walk their dogs, sleep, think, drink and have sex. Treating graveyards as places of entertainment has a lot going for it, and it is a timely reminder that we haven't always been stuffy and subdued in the presence of the dead. In the 18th century, graveyards were places to graze your cattle, for children to play games, women to hang out washing, for plays, fights and fairs. If reusing graves proves unacceptable as a solution to the shortage of burial space, perhaps the wonderful cemeteries at Camberwell, Aldersgate and Putney Vale could become London's next major visitor attraction. Beats the Dome.
"Grave Concerns: the disposal of London's dead" is at the Museum of London (020 7600 3699) until 29 October
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