Symbolic Forest

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.

We walked up and down and around the town, admiring the scenery, admiring all the people and their outfits. I hadn’t dressed up myself. I don’t do dressing up. At the top of the steps to the abbey, we paused in the graveyard and watched people posing for photos, before turning and looking out over the sea, at the town disappearing into the mist. The weather was strange: dark, windy, but misty too. The town disappearing into winter.

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Keyword noise: abbey, goths, graveyards, headstone, photography, Whitby, Whitby Abbey, Yorkshire.