Sense and Cemeteries: where better to Reflect on Life and Death?

Waverley Cemetery, where Eileen O'Connor's parents are buried

This year when I made a pilgrimage to Coogee to honour Eileen O’Connor’s legacy, I went to visit her parents’ grave in the nearby Waverley Cemetery. I took a measure of good luck dispensed by someone who warned me it wouldn’t be easy to find and a photo of the grave in case that helped. I knew legendary Australians repose there too: bush poet Henry Lawson, and Fanny Durack, the first woman to win an Olympic gold medal in swimming, and I wanted to find them as well. I knew the cemetery ranges over hilly terrain on the cliff tops with spectacular ocean views. Charles and Annie O’Connors’ grave is not far from the fence along the cliff’s edge. I have an irrational fear of edges, so faced the twin hurdles of not having a useful map of the cemetery and not knowing if my courage would hold up as I got closer.

The grave of legendary Australian bush poet, Henry Lawson and his wife Bertha

The main entrance is far from the edge, so I got off to a good start. Established in 1877, the headstones are imposing Victorian gothic confections in marble and granite, marching down a hill that is deceptively reassuring in its gentle slope towards the azure blue beyond. I wandered, enticed to go beyond the architecture and discover the stories.

Room with a View...

In loving memory of

Olive Lethbridge Cowper

beloved infant daughter… aged 2 years

And the gardener said,

“Who gathered this flower?”

Olive’s plot is full sized, so perhaps her loving parents came to join her. The grave is covered in crispy brown dead flower heads of some unknown weed.

Edward George Hall

Aged 2 years and 8 months

My Bud in Heaven

In the midst of life we are in death

This headstone isn’t ambiguous. Edward’s loving father joined him there, four years later, aged only 36, and his grieving widow followed, aged 47. Tragedies tripled.

In Memory of

Our Dear Little Boy

Thomas Gardiner Muir

Born 21^st February 1886

Scotland

Died 26^th March 1890

Born to parents so keen to give him a better life that they risked the long sea voyage from Scotland to Australia, only to have him die here just after his fourth birthday.

Surrounded by graves, the inherent, unavoidable tragedy seeped into my bones. Sometimes, it seems we live in an age of entitlement. Of wants and greed and ‘deserving’, the themes of modern advertising.

Graves yawn, broken by time. Some have built-in vases, the promise that loved ones will bring flowers to honour the dearly departed parent, child, friend… the vases are empty. The generations of loving descendants are lost in the passage of time too. No one remembers them, either.

The cemetery speaks: We aren’t entitled to anything. Not to surviving infancy, not to expectations of the health of our children. Not to life itself.

How do we make sense of life when we are in the midst of death? What is left to measure a life by, if years - and time itself - are meaningless? If no one is left who loves and remembers us?

What would the cemetery say to that? What would Eileen say?

I wondered in the silence.

Measure your life by what matters. Kindness. It is only our kindness that remains and only our kindness that we can take with us.

Eventually, I braved the steeper slope. The obvious presence of the cliff edge stirred my fear of falling, but I didn’t give up, I walked sideways, parallel to the edge, so I didn’t have to face it head on. Row after row of graves. None of them the O’Connors. Finally, I chanced on a cemetery worker and asked for help. Turned out, she doesn’t work here; her ancestors are here and she has been renovating their graves. She was generous with her assistance, but despite her knowledge and checking online databases, she couldn’t find them either. I pulled up the photo of their grave and she suggested I try to match the background: with no map and no compass the angle of a fence and a half-dead tree became my guides. A half-dead tree seems an appropriate signpost, doesn’t it? I’m sure God’s got a sense of humour.

And then I found it! I paid my respects and recalled incidents I remembered about them. The abiding love Eileen had for them.

Annie and Charles O'Connor's grave

Pondering impermanence, I listened to the ocean below. The same ocean that Eileen listened to as she lay dying on a sweltering day 105 years ago. It was choppy, with many small waves peaking. Each peak became a human head, as someone incarnated out of the cosmic waters. The little head popped up and bobbed along for a moment, thinking it was separate from all the other waves. Then it dissolved back into the ocean and disappeared. Wave after wave, head after head. Incarnating and dissolving.

In the blink of a cosmic eye, we all dissolve back into the ocean and discover there is no other, and we are all wet in the same ocean of love.