Why you can never walk alone in a family graveyard

WHENEVER I GO home, I go and have a look at the place where I'm going to be buried. I know where it's going to be because it's where my father and grandfather are buried; in a double plot in a crowded cemetery. Actually, when I go Were it is, of course, to visit their grave, not with the intention of reminding myself of my own mortality. But the idea that this is where I will probably end up is somehow reassuring. EVerything else between now and death is unknown, but where I shall be buried after I die is decided, at least in theory.
In Britain, the habit of visiting graves is uncommon. But in Ireland there still survives this way of paying your respects to the dead. You go to the cemetery chiefly at Christmas and All Souls' Day, though a neighbour of mine goes to see her husband's grave every Sunday and there are some stricken widows who go every day. When you do it is a sociable business, because you are never there alone. There's always someone else, arranging flowers in their relation's grave or just dropping by to say a prayer in passing.
It's a sociable business in another way as well. Because the etiquette of such a visit is not that you make simply for your own father or husband's grave. Instead you pass by those of your neighbours and friends as well, stopping by to say a prayer for them to and for all the poor souls. It is poignant, remembering those who have gone, looking at the gravestones to remind yourself of such-and such's tragically early death, or thinking what a short time ago it seems since your neighbour was brought here, but look on the stone it says that it was ten years ago. It's a reminder of the wider Catholic notion of the community; a society not just of rich and poor, but of living and dead: a Church that stretches backwards in time as well as horizontally throughout the world.
Lately, we have been reminded of the importance of where you are buried by an unholy scandal in Birmingham. There, the wife and mistress of a dead man squabbled in the courts about who is to share his grave.
Two thoughts cross the mind.
One is that a self-respecting woman would hardly want to be buried with a husband who paid her scant respect in life; the other is that a commodious grave can normally accommodate three coffins if the parties were minded to compromise.
But the bitterness of the battle between the two women rings entirely true. In death the status of our relationships is established. The position of a wife at a funeral is that of honour. And there is no more poignant commentary on the effect of divorce that to witness the first wife of a famous man at his funeral, her grief entirely overshadowed by the respect accorded to his most recent spouse.
The idea of being united in death has a natural congruity with being united in life. Hence the sacred nature of ancestral graves. When Bosnian peasant refugees talk about ethnic cleansing, the most poignant aspect is that ttey are violently displaced from where their forefathers are buried.
But there is more to it than that. The importance of where your remains are reminds us of that fundamental doctrine at the end of the Creed; little mentioned now but absolutely essential to the Christian understanding of the body. It is that of the physical resurrection of the dead.
This is a doctrine that was brilliantly depicted by mediaeval and early Renaissance art; the emergence of the dead from their coffins, hauling themselves out of their graves, still wrapped partially in shrouds.
There's a nice tradition that goes with this, which is that when the body is resurrected it appears at the age when it was most physically perfect, which is, I seem to recall, about 23. This is a teaching that seems fundamental: the notion that heaven is not just something for the disembodied soul, but that our unity with God will be for all of us, body and soul alike.
Personally I like the notion of the resurrection of the dead, with all its complications. And when I look at where my father is buried, beside all his friends and neighbours, I like to think that when the dead do rise up in Arklow cemetery, it will be in the nature of a great big party.