Grave expressions in Britain
We in the US have become accustomed to the roadside displays maintained by family and friends of highway accidents. And we're are that in our cemeteries not everyone agrees on what is a tasteful grave.
In the UK they've taken it to a whole new level.
The sight and sound of these exhibitions grows ever more exuberant - so much so that an Essex council is introducing a one-month limit on what can be put on a grave. Other councils are surely likely to follow.Traditionalists argue that graveyards are places of peace and contemplation and those who visit to lay flowers on Mum’s grave shouldn’t have to negotiate their way past piles of soft toys or be disturbed by the cacophony of competing wind-chimes. But for their part, those who want to heap graves with cuddly toys protest their right to remember their dead in whatever way they choose. Which means that anything goes, from a gravestone in the shape of a Newcastle United shirt, to life-sized effigies of the deceased, to resin pigs and dogs, plastic dolphins and even meerkats.
...
[A] public graveyard cannot ‘allow’ the unbridled shriek of competitive grief, because it’s a shared space and your way of mourning may detract from someone else’s. There has to be consideration for others, since, in matters of life and death, we’re all in this together.
Click to see the kinds of displays she's describing.
How would you describe this as competitive grief, detracting someone else's? Is it snobbish to judge and regulate how others grieve?
Certainly, the piles of "stuff" suggest a certain Pharonic view of death? O_o [I always think "Give the stuffed animals to LIVING children!"]
I must admit, in the case of the wind-driven "Pop Goes the Weasel" graveside musical toy, if *I* were there to grieve (someone else), I would probably (if it were unattended) go turn it off/disable it, for my duration...
JC Fisher
Posted by tgflux![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.episcopalcafe.com/lead/nav-commenters.gif)
|
February 10, 2011 2:26 PM
In the Kent graveyard where my father is buried are adjacent graves with artificial and real flowers, windmills, stuffed toys, and tokens of affection for the dead including pictures. It's a relatively new phenomenon (since Princess Diana's death?) to do with externalising feelings of grief. None of it intrudes into my own--in fact, plastic flowers have appeared on Dad's (unadorned) grave placed there by someone else who misses him.
When we had the inscribed headstone put on his grave this past January, it was a cold bleak wet day. But his grave isn't far from that of our neighbour's wife who died over Christmas. And it heartened me to know that her colorfully adorned grave is an expression of love from her family.
My mother told me that she recently saw a Green Woodpecker fly through the cemetery. Perhaps there will be untidy nests and hungry fledglings crying to be fed in a few weeks. Dad would be pleased.
Posted by deirdregood![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.episcopalcafe.com/lead/nav-commenters.gif)
|
February 10, 2011 9:47 PM
adjacent graves with artificial and real flowers, windmills, stuffed toys, and tokens of affection for the dead including pictures. It's a relatively new phenomenon (since Princess Diana's death?) to do with externalising feelings of grief.
"Externalizing" or commodifying, Deirdre?
Grief has been "external" since the first ripped garment or beaten breast. But I think that the Pharaohs were buried w/ so much loot, precisely because they could. I think the commodification of grief may show the same impulse. Ala Hallmark, "When you CARE ENOUGH to send [i.e., BUY] the very best" [Below ground, Cadillac caskets show the same impulse. "You don't care, if you don't buy."]
I think this attitude needs to be---apart from the suddenly berieved, of course---questioned.
JC Fisher
Posted by tgflux![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.episcopalcafe.com/lead/nav-commenters.gif)
|
February 11, 2011 5:33 PM