Symbolic Forest

It’s over eighteen months now since The Mother died, and I’ve barely even talked about it here, aside from one piece I wrote about burying her. There are a whole heap of reasons for that. For one thing, the posting rate here has slowed down to one post a month if that, due to all the various other things making demands on my time. For another, a whole heap of the experiences I had around my mother’s deah pivot on it being, when it happened, less than a year into my gender transition. As I wasn’t open about being transgender on this site until this March, I could hardly recount a lot of the things that happened, from the excited curiosity of the funeral arranger, to the cold stares some of my mother’s friends gave me as I walked into the church behind the coffin.

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Keyword noise: death, The Mother, queer, trans, transgender, transition, Pride.

It was a bright, crisp, autumn afternoon, the sun still high in the sky. I put my hand in front of my face to shade my eyes from it. Nobody else did, and I wondered if they thought I was saluting.

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Keyword noise: death, funerals, burial, The Mother, religion, cemetery, The Children.

In search of more historical things to write about on here, I remembered something I had once randomly happened across when I was a teenager. A memorial, in the next village, to a man who had randomly died there. So yesterday I went out, bent over against the January wind, to search for it, find it, photograph it and write about it. Having only a vague memory from years ago, I was fully prepared to have to spend hours searching for the thing. In the event, though, I couldn’t miss it.

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Keyword noise: Lincolnshire, North East Lincolnshire, Barnoldby, death, memorial, history, local history.

It being the end of October, tonight is Halloween, or nos calan Gaeaf for any Welsh-speakers reading. I’m not in costume and I haven’t decorated the house, but I did think it might be nice to have a suitably Halloween-themed post on here. Rather than go with ghosts, ghouls or goblins, I’ve gone with a tomb, a relatively interesting one, so much so that English Heritage have designated it a listed building. It’s a place I only found out about a few months back via an Instagram post by Kate of Burials and Beyond. As it’s only a couple of miles or so from where I grew up, my immediate reaction was “why have I not heard about this place before?” So yesterday, I went down there with my camera.

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Keyword noise: Lincolnshire, North East Lincolnshire, Laceby, Grimsby, Sweden, Norway, Peter Haagensen, Haagensen Memorial, memorial, monument, death, burial, cemetery, Halloween, Nos Calan Gaeaf.

A trip away last weekend, to what is arguably one of the most iconic sites in British, or at least Anglo-Saxon, archaeology. It’s been famous since the 1930s, there have been TV series made about it, and it has shaped the way we see Anglo-Saxon Britain ever since. The site I’m talking about is: Sutton Hoo.

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Keyword noise: archaeology, British archaeology, history, Raedwald, Sutton Hoo, Sarah from Ipswich, Ancient Britain, Anglo-Saxons, death, burial, ship burial, cemetery, graveyard, photography, River Deben, East Anglia, Woodbridge, Suffolk.

Recently, I’ve been watching the Netflix documentary series Surviving Death, covering various pieces of evidence for the existence of an afterlife, across various themes. It was…an interesting watch, which tries to stay even-handed; but its thematic approach meant a huge degree of difference between how each topic was presented and how plausible each one seemed to be.

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Keyword noise: Netflix, Surviving Death, television, death, mediums, paranormal.

When the weather forecast says there’s going to be snow I’m always slightly cynical. For one thing, I’m suspicious the forecast always errs on the side of caution when it comes to snow. Secondly, in this part of town, snow falls less and sticks less than on the higher ground of high-altitude suburbs like Clifton and Horfield. In Easton, the snow is rare and quickly turns to slush.

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Keyword noise: Bristol, winter, seasons, snow, death, cemetery, Greenbank, Eastville, Easton, Greenbank Cemetery, history, local history, railway, disused, Rosemary Green.

Regular readers might remember the post last week about Ridgeway Park Cemetery, a small and heavily overgrown cemetery bordering Eastville Park in Bristol. As our daily exercise at the weekend, I took The Children back there again, but took the Proper Camera with me this time.

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Keyword noise: Bristol, Easton, Stapleton, heritage, history, local history, Ridgeway Park, cemetery, death, grave, photography.

Another day, another cemetery, although back on to a human one this time. Back in October, Twitter user @libbymiller asked if I knew Ridgeway Park Cemetery. Although I do know it, and I’ve been foraging for brambles there frequently in summer, for some reason I’ve never taken any photos. Today I woke up, saw it was a fine frosty day, so tried wandering off in that direction.

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Keyword noise: Bristol, Easton, Stapleton, heritage, history, local history, Ridgeway Park, cemetery, death, grave, photography.

Last night was a wild night. Howling wind, hammering rain, the sort of storm that wakes you up as it’s trying to blow your bins down the street.

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Keyword noise: Bristol, history, local history, death, cemetery, pet cemetery, Ashton Court.

This is one of an occasional series of articles recounting the stories around my dad’s death from cancer in 2019, and what happened afterwards. More specifically, this post follows on directly from this one about his funeral service.

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Keyword noise: death, funerals, The Children, The Father, religion, cemetery, burial.

I’ve written a few things so far about my father’s death, just over a year ago now. Some were recollections written recently; the post about his death itself was written down not long after it happened. I’m glad I wrote it when I did, because, in trying to write this post, on how it felt to “host” a funeral, to be one of the more prominent mourners at it, there is an awful lot that I realise now I don’t remember.

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Keyword noise: death, funerals, The Children, The Mother, The Father, undertakers, religion, belief, church.

Semi-regular readers might remember that, about a month ago, I posted about Greenbank Cemetery and its history, and looked at the available historic maps online to track its growth through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This weekend I went back to Greenbank for the first time since I wrote that post, partly for the autumnal atmosphere and partly to see how much evidence is visible on the ground for the different phases of growth I identified on the maps.

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Keyword noise: history, local history, Bristol, Easton, Greenbank, Greenbank Cemetery, cemetery, heritage, death, weekend, maps, archaeology.

So, yesterday’s post was originally going to be this blog’s sole Hallowe’en post for this year. As it happened, though, the other thing I did yesterday was take The Children out to visit one of the local castles, which turned out to have at least its fair share of autumnal creepiness and gloom. It was Farleigh Hungerford Castle, just to the south of Bath, originally built in the 14th century by Sir Thomas Hungerford, first Speaker of the Commons. Nowadays it is almost entirely ruined, a couple of jagged towers propped up and stabilised by English Heritage concrete. The only buildings left standing are the chapel and associated priest’s house.

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Keyword noise: Farleigh Hungerford, death, burial, coffins, photography, castles, E Nesbit, English Heritage, ghost stories, Hilary Mantel, history, human remains, effigies, crypts, ruin.

The other week, I said how you can’t just bury a dead body without there being an awful lot of paperwork involved, at least not in any sort of above-board way. Moreover, one thing I didn’t even get to was that: when you do bury a body, you can’t just pop the gravestone up at the head of the grave there and then. The rules vary from place to place, but to avoid causing some sort of tragic subsidence-induced gravestone-toppling accident, you have to leave the grave to settle for a number of months with some sort of temporary grave marker in the ground instead. Then, some while later—and potentially when you’ve saved up the money, because gravestones are expensive—you can pull up the temporary cross or whatever and replace it with the final thing.

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Keyword noise: The Mother, death, relationships, burial, cemetery, graveyards, grave, headstone, divorce, family, funerals, stonemasons.

This is another post in a vaguely-connected series about my dad’s death, just over a year ago now, and the various events and processes that followed as a result. If you haven’t had to deal with a death in the family yourself: you might be vaguely aware of some things, less aware of others, but some parts of it will no doubt be a complete mystery, as they were to me. Moreover, if you do have to deal with a death in the family, then most likely everything you do is through a fog of stress and uncertainty. It has taken me a year to write down some of the things here, partly because of how much work all the things listed here were to do.

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Keyword noise: death, bureaucracy, Grimsby, Cleethorpes, Lincolnshire, North East Lincolnshire, paperwork, Death Certificate, Register Office, Cleethorpes Town Hall.

Yesterday, after the rain had stopped, we went for a walk around Greenbank, the local Victorian garden cemetery. It’s a lovely place to visit whatever the weather, but on a cold day, after a rainstorm, with drips coming from every branch and all of the colours having a dark rain-soaked richness, it is a beautiful quiet place to wander around. Even when the children are pestering you to turn around and head back home so they can have some hot chocolate and watch TV. “It is a very hot chocolate sort of day,” said The Child Who Likes Fairies.

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Keyword noise: Bristol, local history, Greenbank, Greenbank Cemetery, heritage, Easton, cemetery, history, maps, death, The Children, weekend.

Almost a year ago, give or take a week or two, my dad died. I wrote, a few days later, about the experience, or at least part of it. Starting from being woken in the middle of the night by a phone call from the hospital, and ending with myself and The Mother walking out of the hospital, wondering what would happen next. I scribbled it down a few days later, after I had had a couple of days to process it, but whilst it was still relatively fresh in my head. The intention, naturally was to write more about the experience of being newly-bereaved, the dullness of the bureaucracy, of everyone else’s reactions to you, the hushed voices and awkward moments. Of course, none of that ever got written. Nothing even about his funeral. Much of it has now faded. I was thinking, though, now that I’ve relaunched this blog once more, maybe I should go back, go back over those few weeks last October, and try to remember exactly what it did feel like.

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Keyword noise: death, funerals, comedy, humour, The Mother, coffins, undertakers, Ovo.

So, it’s never a good sign when a hospital phones you at 2am, is it.

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Keyword noise: death, cancer, hospitals, The Father, The Mother.

Monday morning, about ten past seven. I was getting dressed ready for work when K shouted. I went to the top of the stairs, and she came the bottom.

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Keyword noise: David Bowie, The Children, death, celebrities.

The Mother phoned up today, as she does regularly, to tell us all the latest exciting goings-on in her social circle. Her friend George, who she knew from church, has died aged 85, after a long illness. “Of course, he’d been ill for years,” she said, “and he was in great pain. By the end he was screaming. ‘Take me, Lord, take me!’ It was a blessing when he died.”

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Keyword noise: Anglicanism, Christianity, compassion, death, god, illness, religion, superstition.

The phone rang on Saturday morning, and The Mother was on the end. “I’ve got some bad news,” she said.

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Keyword noise: The Cat, death, miaow, pets, The Mother.

In the news recently: the government is making moves to reuse old burial plots, to deal with the problem of overcrowded graveyards. People are, naturally, a bit shocked at the idea of disturbing one’s eternal rest, especially given the synchronicity between this news and the reburial of Gladys Hammond.

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Keyword noise: burial, charnel house, cremation, death, Evelyn Waugh, funerals, Gladys Hammond, graveyards, history, invented tradition, Jessica Mitford, Kutná Hora, Sedlec, ossuary, ritual, The American Way Of Death, The Loved One, tradition.

As it’s Good Friday, good Christians everywhere should be eating fish and following the Stations Of The Cross. I’m not any sort of Christian, good or bad, but even so it’s a good day to think about self-sacrifice for The Cause, whatever that happens to be.

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Keyword noise: Christianity, crucifixion, death, Easter, Good Friday, illegality, international law, Iraq, Jesus, Malcolm Kendall-Smith, martyrdom, Millenarian, pacifism, Passion, publicity, RAF, religion, sacrifice, war.

Two small things today, because I’m too sleepy to write more.

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Keyword noise: 1970s, books, death, Glasgow, Glasgow Subway, history, Jan Mark, literature, obituary, photography, railway, reading, subway, underground, Zeno Was Here.

I can’t help but feel slightly sickened at pre-obituaries – the endless news reports on the life and actions of famous people who are dangerously ill. It didn’t seem too bad during the slow death of George Best,^* but the coverage of Ariel Sharon’s stroke has been terrible. As I’m writing Sharon is in a coma, but definitely alive; but for the past day or so every news report I’ve heard has been about how Middle-Eastern politics will change after he is gone – or, even worse, what his impact on history has been. These really are just obituary reports under another name.

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Keyword noise: Ariel Sharon, George Best, celebrities, death, jumping the gun, obituary.

The last couple of posts make me sound like an old curmudgeon. I try not to be.

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Keyword noise: death, Sinister, sudden, unexpected.