In Roman times graveyards were kept far away from the cities, but in Highgate cemetery, London, the dead rested close to the living. The cemetery was one of the seven graveyards opened around the outskirts of central London in the nineteenth century to help limit the spread of disease. Its sepulchres remained close to the heart of the city if not within it, and respects were paid to the dead in accordance with modern notions of cleanliness. No church bell rang out over Highgate cemetery, where time seemed to have stopped. New graves were dug among the old; white marble tombstones sat alongside the simple stone or granite slabs that lined the cemetery’s long alleyways. Moss crept over rich and poor alike, their tombs drowning in rampant weeds and ferns. Great tits shook the branches of hornbeam and holly bushes, as grey squirrels scampered back and forth. Whatever the shape of their sepulchres, their mausoleums, their cenotaphs or their vaults, all were dust and unto dust returned, as man was given back to the earth. Here, a man in a black suit walked slowly, hands buried in his pockets, along the paths that wandered beneath the branches. His was a visit long awaited – a journey to the past, and to history.
In Highgate cemetery, everything deserved to be seen, to be felt, to be experienced. Everything deserved to be taken in. The afterlife was present, here, and sometimes one could feel something in the cemetery – voices, whispers, birdsong, children playing – and there was a certain comfort in it. The man walked through the entrance, flanked by Egyptian columns. A shiver ran down his spine as he breathed in the fresh, musky odour. He walked forward casually, observing the dates of birth and death engraved on the tombstones. He calculated. Some had died young, while others had spent almost a century on this earth. Could such lives really be summed up by epitaphs? The man began to read on the first of the graves. There were many styles of epitaph: Jesus have mercy on his soul, Loving wife, mother and grandmother, Writer of this century. The man in the black suit remained pensive. The closer he got to death, to the end, to the beginning of eternal life, the more conscious he became of the good deeds he had done and the sins he had committed. He allowed himself to get lost in the winding paths, daydreaming as he treaded through the vegetation. A stone angel caught his attention. It seemed as though it had always been there, as if sprouted from the earth. It was a fallen angel, a guardian of souls and a prisoner of the cemetery. An angel that would no longer fly, or laugh, that would never again taste the sun’s rays or the fresh air. An angel lost, like himself, having wandered into a place caught between life and death. Then the man arrived at the immense Lebanese cedar tree that towered over the cemetery. He set his hand on its wet bark. This, here; this was age, this was time. He dreamed of his beautiful country, the Kadisha valley and the forest of the Cedars of God. He remembered the war in Lebanon and his family’s arrival in London. He dreamed of the dead of his country, the roads of the martyrs, and the first surah of the Quran that was read for the deceased. Here he walked as a non-believer; he wandered, he forgot. What was there to believe in now? What world had the dead left for us? How could one still live among the living? As if from beyond the grave, a soft angel’s voice answered him: “All things in their own time.”
Alan Alfredo Geday
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