Highgate

I’ve been traveling and on vacation, which is why I’ve been absent from the blogosphere for a while. I think, dear readers, you can expect the next several entries to be reflections on my comings and goings, so bear with me.

A few weeks ago while in London, I took a tour of Highgate Cemetery, a Victorian cemetery that opened in 1839. Since then, more than 168,000 people have been buried there. The eastern side of the cemetery houses Karl Marx, among others, but our guided tour was through the older, western half – a shadowy and mysterious tangle of invading ivy, shady trees, and old tombstones. 

I suppose there’s nothing to get you thinking about the passing of time like a tour of an overgrown cemetery. The graves themselves are interesting, pushed up by or buried underneath shrubs, vines and wildflowers. A few notable names pop out here and there, but most people are forgotten. For each, though, at some point someone cared enough to buy a plot and ensure their loved one had a final resting place at Highgate; today the majority have passed from living memory. 

One of the largest mausoleums in Highgate was built by a man named Julius Beer, who, so the story goes, placed it at the highest point in the cemetery in part to snub the Victorian society that had snubbed him. Our tour guide told us Beer had made a fortune on the London Stock Exchange, and the mausoleum he built would have cost between $3 and $4 million in today’s dollars.

What struck me about Julius Beer’s mausoleum wasn’t how much he had made in his life, or how much he had spent on his burial plot. It was that the mausoleum housed the remains of his daughter, who died at age 8. Inside is a large white statue depicting her sleeping form being held by an angel. I don’t remember exactly what the tour guide said about how the girl died, but Beer was brokenhearted, presumably for the rest of his life. 

I visited Highgate at the height of the debate over the debt ceiling. As our leaders argued over money and spending and the economy as if that were all that mattered, I looked at Julius Beer’s name outside his mausoleum. A fortune spent on a mausoleum to put Victorian society to shame didn’t heal Julius Beer’s grief. Having all the money in the world won’t save us from loss, or pain, or grief any more than it will buy us friends or happiness.

Our economic troubles, our antagonistic society and our divided nation are serious problems, but in the end every human being faces but one true reality: we were born from dust, and to dust we will return. What happens in between should be more about sharing together the big questions of grief and pain and joy and hope than about bottom lines and scoring points and who can make whom look worse.

And perhaps it’s worth taking a walk through a forgotten cemetery every now and then to remember.