Dialogue: Memorials to make you die of embarrassment

By DAVID HILL

You want to see your name in print? Try letters to the editor. You want to see your name more permanently in print - maybe in cursive, sans serif and/or block capitals? Try a gravestone.

The shapes of and sentences on gravestones are a paradox. Why, after striving to show good taste in life, do we often show such rotten taste in death?

Memorials to our dead meet deep human needs. At first, they provide a focus for grief. Later, they act as tangible references. Maintaining them is a kind of caring. They declare love, sorrow, pride, gratitude.

Less successfully, they also declare the tastes of their era.

We smile at earlier generations' graves - angels and urns; cherubs and columns. Yet many present-day headstones are sad proof that powerful emotions do not guarantee powerful expression.

A distressing number of contemporary tombstone texts are variations on the "God took our flower / Our little Nell / He thought he, too / Would like a smell" school of verse. The 21st century still says things on gravestones which in life would make us ... well, die of shame.

These days, talk on tombstones does not come cheap. Your basic granite slab with 20 or so words in silver will set you back nearly $3500. Gold letters - 100 per cent pure gold, which tends to last longer, proclaim the leaflets - cost extra.

I am not going to have gold letters on my basic slab, or my basic lawn plaque.

Indeed, my resolutions for the rest of my miserable, morose, mortal life include an entire chapter devoted to what I refuse to have on my grave.

I am not going to have a stainless steel headstone in the shape of a motorbike cowl, or a painted concrete cast of a V8 engine. I am not going to have the inscription: "Manufactured 1938; Scrapped 2001."

Nor will I have a coloured photo at $350-plus. So many gravestone photos show the dear departed apparently already mummified, or else flushed, unfocused and glass-raising at a party. They remind you of those sweaty society snaps in Metro.

Who wants to be memorialised as "A Visitor From Hawkes Bay"?

I have also vowed that my headstone won't have any incised, painted, $600 logo of cricket bat and stumps, golf clubs or fishing rod.

In the 18th century, gravestones often bore engravings of skulls as a motif of death. Now we include motifs of our spare time activities instead.

It is no doubt commendably less morbid. But a surfboard, a deck of cards, darts and a dartboard, squash racquets, a glaring Doberman, even? You can't help wondering if the Doberman contributed to the time of death.

You can only speculate likewise about the headstone illustration showing a 12-bore shotgun and a brace of dead ducks.

Men are particularly prone to these boyish emblems.

And car-fancying men are the most prone (the most supine, anyway). Do they really want their descendants to think that the only precious thing in their lives was their Holden Kingswood?

I know that many people trying to choose what should go on the gravestone of their parent or partner are in no emotional state to make literary or artistic decisions. But funeral directors and monumental masons are, and they could offer a few gentle guidelines.

The prime aesthetic rule when it comes to gravestone inscriptions should be - the less, the merrier.

The best memorial messages have been the shortest. The 17th century "John Donne; Anne Donne; Undone". Dorothy Parker's "Excuse My Dust". W.C. Fields' "I'd Rather Be In Philadelphia". My all-time favourite from Anon - "Back In Five Minutes".

Something like that on a very plain square will do me.

There are too many other graves I would not be seen dead in.

* David Hill is a Taranaki writer.