Saturday, March 20, 2004

The stories they could tell
It might not be everyone’s idea of the perfect way to pass an idle hour, but for Robert Hillmanit’s a must on visits home. Here, why communing with the dead in the country graveyard leaves him feeling comforted... and thrillingly alive.
In common with many of my fellow human beings, I am terrified of death. But the cemetery, or at least this particular cemetery, soothes me. As I walk among the headstones, the dead revive. I knew so many of them; went to school with some; knew others as friends of my parents, or as parents of my friends. Their names create a pleasant humming sensation in my head. At the same time, that part of me that looks for instruction in life murmurs placatingly, ’See? They all went through it. Doesn’t seem to have done them much harm, does it?’
The graves evoke images and episodes. I see Normie’s grave and I instantly recall at all ruddy-faced boy with jug ears who was widely regarded as a total fool, until he pulled on the school colours and lined up in the ruck on the footy team. Then, he became something fabulous. And here’s James, never called Jim, who could draw Warner Bros cartoon characters (Bugs, Daffy, Tweety and Sylvester) so deftly that we all foretold a great future for him in the world of art...
Scarcely less vivid to me are the stories of those who expired before my time. One young woman’s century old tomb stone tells us that she ’drowned while attempting to cross the Goulburn River in flood to bring help for her neighbours’. I see her as the heroine of a silent moovie, arriving at the river’s edge and raising her hands in dread as piano music mounts to a crescendo; one hand is raising above the water, and then - nothing. ’Alas!’
This is where my graveyard solace comes from, I think: the hope that someone who knew me, will read my name on a headstone and restore me briefly to the world I did not wish to leave.

[Good Weekend 20 March 2004 p 41 (Sydney Morning Herald)]