Remembering death
A gentle rain falls through the verdant canopy of the Cimitière Père Lachaise. Birds swoop and sing in the bath. A soft icy breeze pushes past us as Eric and I scramble up and through and around the narrow overgrown paths. Between tombs and headstones, some so old and overgrown the names of those they guard have been long since lost… and forgotten. There’s a quiet here, as if nobody wants to speak louder than a whisper, if at all.
My grandmother, Alwina, used to take her daily walk through the cemetery near her house and, as a girl, I found it morbid and scary. Who would want to walk amongst the buried dead? But this day, in this place, I understood. It had been a long time since I’d been in a cemetery and this one felt somehow comforting. There were graves that had been taken over by ivy and other plants bursting out of them. A beautiful reminder that we all come from earth and, even in the middle (or slightly northwest of middle) of a large city like Paris, we are intertwined; never separate; our bodies are just a chapter of the whole and one day they will die, their molecules will rearrange, and they will rejoin the soil.
I find solace in that. The visual representation of it. I think about death every day. Every time Eric leaves the house for work and kisses me goodbye, I wonder if it’s the last. I say a prayer that it’s not. Every time I get into my car, or an airplane, or go to the grocery store, I wonder if this is it. Is it normal to think about death so constantly? I fear it. I fear leaving people behind. I fear being left behind… alone.
Our little family is my whole world- they are everything to me- I know that my experience with them as we are now, at the happiest I’ve ever been, will change. I know that we only have this brief moment in our lives to be just as we are. Our merry band of four who want for nothing and are so lucky to have found each other. I hold on as tight as I can, trying to fully experience every day with them. Savoring a little tighter to the ordinary nothings- coming in from the house to find them all cozy on the couch, listening to Eric hum and talk to the pups while I’m doing laundry in the other room, washing up the dishes together and folding laundry. These are my most precious moments. The ones that we re-live regularly, the ones that stack-up to make a life worth remembering.
As we walked up the hill, higher and steeper, along raggedy stone steps twisted by roots, we just listened; to the birds cawing and chirping, to a single leaf fall from a tree and drop like paper onto a pile of others just like it, to our footsteps fall and rise against the worn cobblestone path. Looking from one headstone to the next. One mausoleum to the next. Some newer, some older, how old is this one? Some with fresh flowers, some with broken statues, some crooked from writhing roots- what did those trees look like when these people were buried here? How long has it been since only strangers have visited their graves? How long are we remembered after we’re gone?
We continued to walk, both in our contented silence, at the top of the hill now on a newer paved road when Eric pointed and said, “Gertrude Stein”.
There she was, flanked by two imposing headstones- large and important seeming- her humble grey headstone with a simple “Gertrude Stein” etched into it. No live flowers. No ornament. Only large gravel adorned the top of her grave. I walked closer. Little stones lined the edge, I picked a few up off the ground and placed them in a row next to the others, a meager contribution, but I wanted to pay homage somehow. And then I saw them, tucked under and in between the stones: small crumpled notes, beaten by the weather, love notes that people had left her. One read, “I finally moved to Paris just like you”.
Growing up with artist parents, Gertrude Stein had been a household name. Her writing resonated with countless of us misfit creatives dreaming about another way to live. She was the Grande Dame Patron of the Arts in Paris in the early 20th century and so many of the artists of that period who we revere as “THE artists” only became “THE” because of her. Hers was a straightforward voice that sought truth, honesty, and non-conformity. She dared people to see the world through a different perspective and art (painting, sculpture, literature, …) provided the lens to do just that- to see.
Her grave, shadowed by the grandiose expensive tombs on either side, made me think of her own struggle to be heard and understood. This no fuss grave, for a no fuss woman. There were no tour groups gathering around to take pictures of her, like there were for Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison; no roped-off area. Just a simple rocky gravestone. It didn’t seem like enough for a woman who gave the world so much. We walked away, continuing down the hill, and I was bothered by it. Almost outraged: don’t people know who she is? Doesn’t anybody care about what she did?! Her grave should be just as celebrated as those others!
And then we turned a corner and were nearly stopped in our tracks by a commanding 14 ft tall statue, an emaciated giant dark and writhing out of sharp green copper flames that seemed to be birthed by the mouth of Hell itself. As we approached, we saw that it was the first in a series of statues that commemorated the millions of people who were murdered at the Nazi Death Camps. There was one for Auschwitz, Dachau, Ravensbruck, and several others dedicated solely to the lives that were needlessly stolen. As plaques alone, they would have brought anyone to tears, but as statues, they jolted us into submission, drew us into the terror, and paralyzed our attention so that we felt only their stories.
I thought about the artists whose minds and bodies worked in tandem to create such pieces; wondered what it took from them and what it gave back. How their work is still speaking to people today, still carrying a story that needs to be heard.
My thoughts drifted to other artists, like Gertrude Stein, and how she was a champion for the voice of the artist, who are a voice for us all. And I realized that she didn’t need a monument to herself, or a parade at her grave. Her contribution to humanity IS the monument; the life, love, criticism, and honesty she put into the world is what will last longer than any carved bit of stone slowly eroding away in an old cemetery. There’s a lesson for me in recognizing that. I don’t need to be Instagram famous or to “make a mark” in order to live a life of value. I can add my small creative thread to the great story of humanity and that can be enough.
I thought about the role that art plays in our lives. Art is the language we use to communicate and understand the parts of ourselves that cannot be expressed by emojis or memes. Art tells a story of emotion that spans the length of humanity; that commands attention; that inspires change; that heals; that speaks; that is our collective story of living. Art is birthed from a creative spirit that lives inside all of us- we just have to feed it and it will grow.
We will all die. If we’re lucky, we get more moments of love than hate while we live. None of us is entitled to anything; we are only guaranteed change through life and eventual death. Does it matter if our names are remembered after we’re gone? Or is our contribution to the human story enough?
We continued down the hill, toward the entrance, lost in conversation about what we’d just experienced along that downward curve between Gertrude Stein and the WWI Monuments. We passed by Jim Morrison’s grave and the hordes of loud tourists stopping for just enough time to capture their Instagram moment with it, then quickly move along- barely stopping their jabber for 2 seconds in the process- and finally made our way out of the arched entrance in the stone wall that encloses the cemetery. The drizzle had stopped, we dodged puddles in the street, and made our way back “home”.
Père Lachaise was beautiful and, the afternoon well-spent. But I walked away with more than a check in my “must see list”. In a world where keeping-up with the influencers has become the norm, where American human worth is measured in the image of monetary wealth, and where behaving any which way (no matter the toll it takes on those around us) in the pursuit of “work” and “money” is not only accepted but applauded, I was reminded how fleeting our lives actually are. What’s the substance that makes up a life? Is it a newly renovated kitchen, or is it how we act towards the places and people who support us?
The Buchenwald-Dora Monument had a plaque that read:
Qu’a jamasis ceci montre comme
L’homme dut tomber et comment
Le courage et le devouement
Lui conservent son nom d’homme
– Louis Aragon
Let this forever show
That mankind had to fall
And how courage and devotion
Conserved the name of mankind
– Louis Aragon
Courage and devotion conserve the name of mankind. Not wealth and image.
As they say in France, “Bonne continuation mes amis”. Literally meaning “good continuation, friends”, but roughly meaning “good luck on your journey”.
Travel will change you… if you let it.
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