In 2019, I returned to London for the first time since 1990. I remembered the city vividly, both because I’d looked at the photos countless times and because at age twelve, London dislodged my small world and sent it rolling away like a seed on a slanted floor that somehow finds its way into a crack and then to the earth, where it blooms into a thing called wanderlust.
I channelled that feeling—or perhaps the feeling channelled me—as I went on my first London walk in nearly 30 years. I discovered a massive cemetery two blocks from my rental flat and turned into it without thinking. Brompton Cemetery links the Earl’s Court and Fulham neighbourhoods. The main path leads to two parallel colonnades with Roman columns that hug two rows of catacombs and end at a domed chapel. Foxes linger at cemetery’s edges, squirrels use coffins and monuments to do their version of parkour, and crows frequently alight atop gravestones as though they know how photogenic this looks. Winding vines, moss, and lichen cover many of the graves, slowly subsuming the stone.
My favourite part of Brompton Cemetery is a tall, unmarked mausoleum that resembles an Egyptian obelisk and is rumoured to be a time machine. It contains the remains of Hannah Courtoy, a Victorian woman who died in 1849, and her daughters. The key to the mausoleum was lost on a visit by family members in 1980, so now no one can prove it isn’t a time machine.
I walk around the time machine, trying to peer in the dirty window and keyhole. Other visitors try similar tactics, eventually settling for photos of the outside. I wonder how many of them had thoughts like mine—that if this really is a time machine and if I can somehow crack into it, maybe I can travel back to a time before I walked foreign cities looking for my dead dad.
*****
Every morning of my family’s 1990 London vacation, I awoke to find my dad pouring over maps, charting our routes and destinations for the day. He memorised Tube lines and directions and guided us around the city as though he’d been born there. We climbed to the top of St. Paul’s cathedral, visited Parliament, watched two musicals, listened to people ranting on soapboxes at Speaker’s Corner, walked across London Bridge, and ate at cosy, fire-warmed pubs. Even in the constant drizzle, the trip was magical, both because of London and because of my dad, who admittedly over-planned a bit, but who made sure we didn’t miss anything.
He taught me to read maps at a young age, starting with places like Epcot Center or Sea World and building up to city maps. My mom had a bad sense of direction and a tenuous relationship with anything sporting a compass. When I was nine, we got lost during a trip to Chicago and I got promoted to the front seat to navigate. I still remember how it felt to get us back onto a highway, like untangling a knotted thread, teasing loose the jumble, straightening out the path.
When I’m in London, I equip myself with a half-dozen maps, each covering different sections of the city. I look at them before I go out, memorise the names of Tube stations, and sometimes write down on a Post-it the names of streets or landmarks I should pass along the way. As I scrawl these notes to myself, I notice how my handwriting has adopted the same hurried, sideways slant as my Dad’s.
*****
In the early 1800s, London’s staggering growth led to a shortage of burial grounds. Churches and mausoleums crammed with coffins became vectors for disease, and buried bodies often gravitated to the surface, bringing with them germs and a pervasive stench. The situation became so dire that in 1832, the UK Parliament passed an act encouraging private companies to build and maintain cemeteries to help alleviate the shortage of burial space and the resulting hygiene problems. The accompanying report argued that private, secular cemeteries offer benefits over church-affiliated ones, calling the latter “injurious” because of the lack of sanitation and because church burials can also diminish “the fabric of the church.”
Within the next nine years, private companies built seven garden cemeteries in London, now known as the “Magnificent Seven.” Ownership has changed over time, as companies have gone out of business, and one of the seven (Brompton) has been nationalised. (Owning a cemetery, it turns out, isn’t a particularly profitable enterprise.) The secularity of these cemeteries represented a stark departure from religious gravesites, as did their architectural and landscaped design.
According to archaeologist and scholar Sarah Tarlow, London’s garden cemeteries were designed for aesthetic appeal, and their naturalistic settings were thought to promote morality. Garden cemeteries commemorated the dead and provided a place to show off expensive memorials, but above all, Tarlow says they were meant to help “mediate the relationship between the dead and the bereaved.”
Tarlow’s words make sense given how often I’ve sought refuge in cemeteries to summon memories and feelings about my dad. In contrast to the orderly rows of many American graveyards, London’s cemeteries offer more physical and metaphysical space to interact with the dead. They flaunt order, as though to suggest that no one can control or contain what emerges after one dies or is buried. Seeing vines, flowers, and mosses growing over the gravestones reminds me of the television show Six Feet Under, which focuses on a family coping with the sudden loss of their husband/father and on the two sons who inherit the family funeral home. The prodigal son, Nate, thinks the whole funeral industry is a crock, and during a wake in which people are shushing a hysterical guest, he argues that death isn’t meant to be groomed into something polite or presentable. It’s not meant to be put in a suit, airbrushed, and then shut tight in a box. It’s meant to be inconvenient, messy, and noisy, and he suggests that people would process death better if they could allow themselves and others to grieve that way.
I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve walked through Brompton Cemetery or how many times I’ve thought about Nate’s rant against the constructed and compartmentalised way so many of us grieve, as though there’s a proper time and place, as though there’s an endpoint. I learned long ago, after several straight weeks of grieving—loudly, in grocery stores and on buses, and quietly, in dark rooms and on late-night walks—that I’d never reach the bottom of my well of grief over my dad’s death. I’ve also decided that I prefer it that way, because what would make me saddest of all would be thinking about my dad or looking at old photos of us and not feeling that wrenching in my chest. The loss is also love, and I don’t want to forget it.
The existence of cemeteries smack in the middle of London neighbourhoods challenges the compartmentalisation between the dead and the living. They remind us that we coexist with the dead all the time, both literally and figuratively. The main entrance of Brompton Cemetery even has a café. Visitors can enjoy a cup of coffee, a sandwich, or a bowl of soup on the grounds. They read the paper, do the crossword, and watch people walk or cycle up and down the main path. I don’t think it matters much one way or another that they’re at a cemetery.
One can visit a garden cemetery casually, as though it’s any other park. One can also visit to commune with the dead. Before my dad died, I didn’t understand that relationships with the dead could keep existing and evolving. But after he died, I felt his presence at certain times and places so palpably that I’d turn around, certain I’d see him standing there. For a couple of years I taught at Western Michigan University, where he had taught for almost 40 years. I cleared out his office over the course of a semester, and each time I had the eerie sensation of being trailed by a ghost. He lingered in that room crammed full of files, photos, a spare pair of shoes, souvenirs from the places we had visited together, a bottle of aspirin, and a packet of gum. “I’ll be back any second,” he seemed to be saying through these objects, some of which I have in my office now, like little time machines.
Even though I didn’t believe in an afterlife, the feeling, however fleeting, that Dad still existed on some plane or in some realm outside of my memories comforted me. Even though he’s not buried in London (or anywhere), garden cemeteries provide a similar comfort. I return to London every summer to teach classes, and when I use a map to chart a route or when I stroll through a cemetery, I listen intently and glance around often, so as not to miss him.
Sometimes I talk to him, pointing out how a shaft of light lands perfectly between two Roman columns, illuminating squirrels scrounging for acorns. I honestly don’t know if that’s something he’d appreciate, but I don’t think about that in the moment. My therapist has suggested that my conception of my relationship with my dad now, 17 years after his death, has very little to do with him. Even though my dad and I had an unwavering bond neither of us questioned through our living and his dying, she’s right. These conversations are a fantasy—my fantasy. Perhaps facilitating such fantasies is what it means for a place to mediate the relationship between the living and the dead.
Once, on one of these walks, my dad and I watched three children play tag as their parents sat on blankets and sipped from Solo cups. The kids didn’t seem to know that they were in a cemetery, running between and among corpses under the ground. Or maybe they did and found nothing strange about it at all. Like the people who take their morning coffee in Brompton Cemetery, they don’t associate cemeteries with Halloween, horror movies, or even death. To them, cemeteries are parks with stones and flowers coming up from the ground, full of paths for running and soft grass for tussling. Spaces full of life.
*****
In the London classes I teach, we read about Victorian practices of memorialisation and remembrance, and we visit some of these garden cemeteries. Not all of my students appreciate these trips. Some Hindu students have expressed discomfort with the idea of walking through a cemetery, as it’s culturally anathema to them. Some of my Chinese students have said that it seems disrespectful to let nature take over gravesites and that they prune the areas around their loved ones’ graves routinely. Two of my Latin-American students clutched each other as they walked around Brompton, as though they expected a ghost to pop out at them. I encourage them to write about how they feel and why. Even those who find the cemetery creepy or strange acknowledge that there are more ways to grieve and to memorialise the dead than they’d considered, which means there’s also a lot about living they’ve never considered.
Once after one of these trips, a student asked why we talk about death so much. Not even a week since arriving in London, a place so teeming with life that I often feel as though I in contrast move in slow motion, they’re reading about mourning rituals in Victorian England in my class, The Death of Ivan Ilyich in Humanities, and the brutality of World War I in Social Science. When taken together, the curriculum does seem a bit fixated on the morbid.
“Death is important,” I told him. “Many people believe it gives life meaning.”
The student nodded but looked unconvinced. I gave the textbook answer, or perhaps the Hallmark card one. I believed what I said, but it still felt flat, expected, insufficient.
*****
After we study Victorian mourning traditions, we pivot to one of my own personal curiosities: people who want to “transcend” death either by prolonging their biological lives indefinitely or by transferring their consciousness to the cloud or to an AI. What once seemed like science fiction is a burgeoning blockbuster industry of anti-aging, cell-rejuvenating, gene-reprogramming products and promises, led by the tech elite. One of the most famous figures to set his sights on immortality is engineer and inventor Ray Kurzweil, who in the documentary Transcendent Man calls death the “loss of everything.” Kurzweil’s father died when he was young, which galvanised his pursuit of eternal life and his Frankensteinian plan to resurrect his father as an AI.
Students often react with shock and sometimes with horror at Kurzweil’s goals and at the adoption of them by people who identify as transhumanists. His aspirations raise countless ethical questions, but on the surface, Kurzweil’s wish feels devastatingly human. If I had a technological way to bring my dad back for just one hug or one conversation, I would (though that’s easy for me to say, given that I can’t). Oncologists often choose that field of study because of a friend or family member who had cancer; perhaps choosing to be an “immortalist” isn’t so different.
On some of my walks through London’s cemeteries, I entertain thought experiments about what might happen if scientists do figure out a way to avoid death. Would cemeteries become relics of the past, reminders of the time when humans were quaintly mortal? In the documentary, Kurzweil drives by a cemetery and says he never understood why people buried the dead, but now he realises it’s so we have a way to get DNA to use when we build robotic, artificially intelligent doppelgangers of the dead (cue the Black Mirror episodes). It’s not the strangeness of this take that strikes me; rather, it’s the cynicism—especially for someone with such unfettered optimism about technology—about how the living remembers their dead and the importance of those memories.
The cover of Time Magazine in September 2013 reads: “Can Google Solve Death?” The related article describes Google’s subsidiary (and Kurzweil’s former employer) Calico, which focuses on stopping or reversing ageing. The phrasing of this question suggests that death is a problem to solve, which encapsulates what I see as an insurmountable flaw in the pursuit of immortality: one has to believe that death serves no purpose. One also has to believe that mourning and remembrance have no purpose.
The question of what distinguishes people from AI and from other animals has become both increasingly difficult and important. To tease this out, writer Brian Christian introduces “the sentence”: “Humans are the only animals that [fill in the blank].”
In class, students fill in the blank with suggestions and cross them off the list almost as quickly. Humans aren’t the only animals that communicate with language, have sex for pleasure, raise other species, hurt one another, or teach one another. After a while, a student—usually a quieter one—will ask: “Are humans the only animals who consider their own mortality?” We discuss how elephants have been documented grieving their dead, returning year after year to spots where loved ones died. Perhaps elephants do think about mortality. Maybe apes or dolphins do too; mother dolphins and whales have been documented swimming with their dead calves.
But do they obsess about death to the point of sleeplessness?
Do they try not to think about their own mortality?
Animals have a survival instinct and thus attempt to avoid their own deaths, but do any strive to vanquish death in general?
I’m willing to bet that humans are the only animals who tell stories about death, who make up different iterations of the afterlife, whether a Christian heaven or nirvana or being uploaded into the cloud. I bet we’re the only ones who build places for the living to remember the dead. We’re the only ones who think about where we might want our ashes scattered or who we hope attends our funeral. We’re the only ones who think about how the living will remember us when we’re gone.
*****
Last summer, we took students to Highgate Cemetery, the most famous of London’s garden cemeteries. Karl Marx, Douglas Adams, George Eliot, and many other historical figures are buried on the landscaped East side. The cemetery’s West side, which holds the remains of people like Michael Faraday, Henry Gray, and Alexander Litvinenko, is an overgrown, hilly mass of trees and plants so invaded by flora that roots have pushed up and knocked gravestones askew. If the names hadn’t been recognisable from human history, one might’ve guessed this cemetery belonged to the fairies.
Near the centre of Highgate’s West Side is Egyptian Avenue, where an entrance of stone columns and a triangular archway lead to a tunnel darkened by dense thatches of interwoven vines. Inside the walkway are sixteen vaults in which some 224 people are interred and whose doors have concave mouldings reminiscent of those the ancient Egyptians used to designate sacred places.
The far ends of the vaults are so removed from any trace of light that a rare species of spider that resides only in places of total darkness—usually caves—lives there. A creature actually wants to inhabit these dank spaces that contain human remains. This creature exists in a city of nine million people, yet also in complete darkness and seclusion. I’m no fan of spiders, but it strikes me as improbably beautiful that life has made its way to this place and has lived here for upwards of a century.
As we explored Highgate Cemetery, students told me about the cemeteries and burial traditions from their own hometowns and countries. They described family treks to hillside gravesites where they burned joss and brought the dead’s favourite food. They told me about singing songs and raising pints, about praying and stacking rocks, placing flowers and gifts.
Students gathered around Douglas Adams’ burial site, pointing to the bowls of pens arranged around the tombstone. Even those who haven’t read Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy thought it was an honour that people who loved an author’s words to leave behind writing implements. Many of my Chinese students expressed surprise at how demonstrative their American classmates were at Karl Marx’s grave. A few students slipped folded-up letters into the mass of flowers and other keepsakes, while others stood nearby talking about the pitfalls of capitalism. I passed a student wandering by herself with a faraway stare, breathing in the place and the thoughts it invited. I didn’t want to interrupt the relationships she was forging with the dead, her dead, whoever they were.
*****
I stopped emailing my dad about eight years ago when my messages started bouncing back, but I can’t imagine I’ll stop talking to him, especially when I’m in London. Remember climbing the stairs at St. Paul’s Cathedral with grandpa? Remember having a meal in front of the fireplace at the Grenadier pub in Belgravia? Remember the picture you took of me as I stood next to an unflappable beefeater, trying to make him laugh? Sometimes I even talk to him out loud, when I’m in a remote section of a cemetery or on a hilltop shouting into the wind.
A Japanese landscaper struggling to deal with the untimely death of his cousin installed an old phone booth in his garden. “Because my thoughts couldn’t be relayed over a regular phone line, I wanted them to be carried on the wind,” he said in an interview on This American Life. Since the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that struck Japan, over 30,000 people have trekked to the “wind phone” to talk to deceased loved ones. Replicas of the wind phone now exist in Ireland, California, and Connecticut. The latter is only 160 miles from Boston, and I’ve started looking at maps to plot the trip.
In a passage about science’s compatibility with spirituality, astrophysicist Carl Sagan writes, “‘Spirit’ comes from the Latin word ‘to breathe.’ What we breathe is air, which is certainly matter, however thin.” When I walk through cemeteries, I often think of the superstition about holding one’s breath when passing a grave—a notion that originated during London’s hygiene crisis, when it was legitimately dangerous to breathe the miasma of the overcrowded graveyards.
Perhaps we do inhale the spirits of the dead when we walk through cemeteries. Maybe that’s what we’re supposed to do. We take in the tiny atoms that knew them, that were them, that in our minds still are them. We pass those atoms through our bodies with blood and veins and cells and memories, a cycle of respiration that continues as dusk falls and we retrace our steps on the winding paths, emerging onto the wide open streets to find our way home.
