Southern Cemetery, Manchester.

Southern Cemetery

I passed Southern Cemetery on the bus yesterday and remembered how, in the past, it would fill me with a sense of gloom and despondency.

The serried ranks of the departed, the lost dreams and the lost loves all reminded me of my own mortality and my very short stay on this planet.

I would almost weep for those that I would leave behind, for those that I had loved and who loved me, perhaps even unknown to me.

Friends and strangers alike, all would touch me, from Joe who was brutally murdered, to my stillborn brother, to distant relatives known only by name and even to those totally unknown to me.

When I was younger I was totally untouched by death, if it happened at all it happened to others, even the death of relatives didn’t touch me, they were all so, so old and in a totally different place to me already that the idea of them being in a place where I would never see them again just didn’t compute.

As I grew older and became more aware of death it was still something that happened to other people and usually by their own misfortune either a drugs overdose or a motorbike crash, I was still immortal.

Even older yet and friends started to die of age related illness rather than misfortune, that might send a shiver through me and give me sleepless nights, but at a distance.

I worried about my funeral. Would friends weep or would they come out of a false sense of duty, or even worse, not come at all having other not very important things to do. I would spend endless hours planning my own wake, what tunes to sum up my misspent life, what food, where to hold it, how long it would last.

Then the horrors came, the thoughts of a long eternity of nothing, that yawning chasm, that not knowing.

Death comes to us all in strange ways, from Joe, cut off from life by a hammer blow in the dead of night, to my father who pricked himself on a rose and didn’t awake the following morning, to “auntie” Nellie who spent long months planning, labelling all her possessions with the names of those she wished to receive, to Debbie who hid her impending death from cancer from me. How will my end come?

I was going to finish by saying that I no longer care but this would have been a lie, I do care, I just realise that it doesn’t matter.

Coda.

This was quickly written after a bus journey past Southern Cemetery. After six months or so I think it stands up, may be a little polish here and there but nothing radical needs doing to it.

As time passes I fear death less and less as the things that make my life worthwhile recede into memory and things that I did with zest and excitement become more like chores, if they are still even do-able