Graveyear

Gwendolyn Haevens, originally from Canada, is a Graduate Student studying North American Literature at the Uppsala University English Department.If you’d told me a few years ago that a graveyard could be a congenial place to hang out, I would have found the suggestion odd. But that was before I’d moved to Uppsala. When I first came to the city, I found myself walking through the old cemetery daily for purely logistical reasons—it was the quickest route from my apartment to the university buildings where I studied. Then it became a place where I went for short walks and to think. Canadian relatives wondered if there wasn’t someplace else less, shall we say, morbid to stroll; but by then the graveyard had become not simply a place the dead were buried and commemorated, but something else altogether.
After the long winter, the first oval snowdrops of spring I see are always the ones pushing though the soil beside the modern chapel. The juvenile blackbirds, obese and unafraid, chirp loudly from headstones, self-righteously splattering their perches with chalky-whiteness. In late spring, flocks of long-necked tulips soar out of the gardened plots. The breezes, gusting through the cherry trees, confetti passers-by with pink-petals. By summer, the jackrabbits graze on the lawns—prepared to bound away in their big-back-wheeled manner if those dandelion leaves I’m waving towards them get too close. I believe, through the logic of reverse synecdoche, that a jackrabbit sighting will bring me luck for the rest of the day.

I wander through the graveyard because, paradoxically, it’s full of life. Of course a memento mori shills directly if I succumb to broodiness—each time I pass a freshly heaped mound covered with armfuls of lilies, perspective comes of its own accord. But beyond the flowers and the bunnies and the macabre warnings against petty vanity, human life is also ever-present in the cemetery. It’s a garden tended by all possible human emotions: love, duty, guilt, pleasure. Or left untended by negligence; by forgetfulness, or hate. The living leave their marks—borrowing the communal tools to re-plant the daffodil bulbs and rake geometrical designs in the gravel plots; or else by letting the grass grow tall and wither. Children leave tiny teddy-bears for their grandparents; grandparents leave them for their grandchildren. Day after day, a father crouches at the foot of his 22-year-old daughter’s grave, re-lighting the candles and filling the jars of wildflowers with water. He gives her his time.
Equally counter-intuitive is the fact that when the grounds have died down into the somber browns and greys of late fall, the cemetery celebrates its most lively day of the year. Every Alla helgons dag (All Saints’ Day, October 31st this year) relatives gather to decorate the graves with pine wreaths, small offerings and photos; they refresh the grave-beds with heather plants and ruffled, purple-edged ornamental cabbages, and encircle the plots with long-burning jarred candles. After dark, the whole yard is alive with bright, evanescent flames. It’s quite a sight.

Last year’s finale, a day or two after the holiday, included a flock of hefty crows who soared over the grounds with the defunct candle-jars in their beaks. They dropped them, repeatedly, from great heights onto the gravestones of poets, professors, and porcelain inspectors, until the jars cracked wide open. The birds cackled raucously over the busted jars, their beaks smeared thickly with the greasy white paraffin which would see them through the still, snow-covered season ahead.