KEY POINTS:
On Christmas Days and Mother's Days, Waikumete cemetery seems to overflow with visitors. No doubt it's the same for Father's Day, though, thankfully, we have yet to find this out. Whatever one thinks about the shameless consumerism that accompanies those days, it's impossible to get through them without thinking about those we've loved and lost. If it's fine, you can be sure of seeing people arrive by the carload, bearing fresh flowers, or just sitting quietly by the graves.
I never thought I'd like a cemetery, but I like this one. I always find my visits uplifting, which seems odd given Waikumete is the final resting place of more than 70,000 people. Every now and then I get lost in its 108ha of land, and end up in an old part of the cemetery, where the headstones are overgrown with weeds and the road has all but disappeared.
The spot where my mother is buried is especially pretty. My cousin gifted us the plot, though he bought it initially for himself and his wife, planning to be buried next to his mother, who died a couple of years before mine. Next door is an empty plot, waiting for my mother's eldest sister, who, I'm happy to say, is still going strong.
The day Mum died, my sisters and I visited the site and felt, perhaps for the first time that day, a sense of comfort. Our green-fingered mum would have loved her final resting place, we decided; a peaceful spot on a hillside, overlooking bush-clad hills and valley, and right next to her sister.
It was also, we noted approvingly, one of the most colourful sections of the cemetery, which meant my colour-loving mother would be right at home. It felt very Pacific, and no wonder given the number of Pacific Island names we counted on the headstones. Many of the graves were festooned with cheerfully garish plastic flowers, and others had pretty, well-tended gardens planted with miniature roses and decorated with pebbles and even gnomes. It was truly a riot of colour.
I know some people prefer their memorials grey and sober, but I like the way this defiantly decorated section seems to thumb its nose at death. I can never again think of a cemetery as a scary and eerie place after this.
I'd never paid much attention to cemeteries or burial plots before my mother died. It seemed too morbid back then, an acknowledgement of the mortality of the people I most feared to lose. Where death was concerned, I much preferred to maintain a state of denial.
This has been harder lately, with death seeming to hover over the shoulders of loved ones. Such that when my daughter found out we were to have a surprise wedding in the family, she summed up recent events as "four funerals and a wedding".
I'd like to think that I approach death a little differently these days. I am less in its grip, I think, though every loss, or threatened loss, fills me with overwhelming sadness. Before my mother died, I couldn't bear to talk about the possibility of either of my parents dying. Now my father's departure (later rather than sooner, we pray) is the subject of both serious talking and joking.
My father is a man of faith who looks forward to joining the love of his life, but we've made him promise to hang around at least until my daughter's 21st birthday, as if this is something he could arrange with God if he really wanted to.
When he goes, he wants a straightforward affair, free of expensive cultural trappings, small and unfussy. Yes, we say, but this isn't about you, it's about us. Funerals, after all, are really more for the living than the dead. They're about making us feel better about our loss, about helping the living move on.
Which is something that the whanau of Carterton woman Tina Marshall-McMenamin might have given thought to before they spirited her body away and buried her on the East Coast without the agreement of one half of her family.
It's probably asking too much of people who couldn't stand to live together to agree on how to bury their dead child, but I wish they'd tried harder.
At Waikumete, our cultural differences in death seem to be effortlessly accommodated. The cemetery has the only Jewish section in the Auckland region, and one of only two Muslim ones. You can choose cremation or burial, which can be in a shroud or a homemade coffin. And there is an urupa to meet the burial needs of urban Maori.
We might have trouble rubbing along in life, but there's no such difficulty in death.
* tapu.misa@gmail.com
