To Inter is Human

to grieve, divine

Before we made cities for the living, we built cities of the dead.

This was supposed to be the first line of a short story, but nothing followed. What came next was thinking about cemeteries, tombs, and necropolises, our stone elegies to the dead, and how building monuments to these painful losses is part of what makes us human.

Grieving is not uniquely human. Many animals mate for life, and do not take a new mate if their one and only leaves them lonely. Funerary rites have been observed in chimpanzees, and elephants mourn like old Italian women. (Italians are not the only culture to employ professional mourners, but I knew one, named Angelina. And she cried at my great-aunt Mary’s funeral like an opera singer.)¹

Humans are the only animals known to bury our dead, so unique to us that it made us expand what we define as “human.” Neanderthals buried their dead, but they are kissing cousins, literally. So did homo naledi, a smaller, more arboreal hominin that might not have done as well on Tinder. The empathy we have for those who also experience grief is compassionate, but also selfish, in a way; it makes us less lonely. We are not the only ones to suffer its cold embrace.

A reconstruction of a young Neanderthal at the Pergamon museum in Berlin

But as I said, we are the only ones left who bury our dead; and we are the only ones who built cities for them. The caves used for burials by homo naledi and neandertalis do count, but we went further. Like I mentioned last week, city-states came to be to centralize grain wealth, and the walls were just as useful to lock the citizens in as they were in keeping invaders out. Before we became cogs in the grain machine, we liked to move around, but our dead friends could not follow. So we built homes for them.

A man tending graves at a memorial in Niigata, Japan.

Mounds, at first. Then megaliths to mark them. Stonehenge may have become a giant sundial, but first, it was a necropolis. The bluestones, smaller than the famous sundial sarsens, were there first, as monuments to the dead. It took a long time for us to find what it was for, and I think we enjoyed the mystery more than the catch. Lugging those menhirs all the way from Wales for a sundial? I get it, winter is terrible. I went for a bloody bike ride at sunrise this morning because it’s a warm and beautiful day, the first real warm day of spring. But you could build the sundial out of local stone. But as a monument to your dead? I could see that. I mean, we still do it.

Bones in the Paris Catacombs. Photo by Sarah Pluck.

Paleoanthropologists judge a society’s level of inequality by how they bury their dead. Does everyone get six feet of earth, or are people conscripted to built pyramids or earthworks for their eternal rest? In some ancient cities, we buried our dead under the hearth. That seems inconvenient. In other tombs, like the neolithic mounds all over Denmark, the dead were buried and then revisited years later to be honored. I’ve visited the Paris catacombs, where the bones of several million Parisians are laid. At some point, the hearth gets full and you need to rent storage. In New Orleans, they crack open their famous mausoleums and move the bones to the back to make room for more. I’ve never gone on a mausoleum tour in New Orleans, and when I tried to visit the famous cemetery in Savannah, it was closed due to storm damage. I also missed Lady Chablis, may she rest in peace.

“accidentally shot as a mark of affection from his brother” but not really.

But I do like to visit cemeteries and our cities of the dead. I don’t take stone rubbings, but I have visited a famous grave or two, whether its someone I want to honor, or someone who left an interesting legacy or headstone. I didn’t go to Madeleine Island in Lake Superior just to take a photo of an infamous tombstone that seems to say that the deceased was “shot as a mark of affection,” but while I was there, I most certainly hunted it down. I haven’t visited the tomb of Walt Whitman in Camden yet, but I am told it is megalithic.

Various tombstones I have visited

Before we got sold on the idea of homesteads, we followed the seasons and the food. Nowadays we sit inside. The cities of the living are less full of bustle, as we huddle in our cemetery caves; they might as well be cities of the dead. Climate-controlled tombs lit by phone screen lanterns.

I am trying to follow my friend, poet Chris LaTray’s lead, and spend 1000 hours outside this year. That’s an hour a day in the winter, and perhaps 5 in July. That’ll be pretty easy, as we have a pool. But in the winter, I am often a homebody. Not this year. We had little snow, and I was out hiking nearly every morning. It improved my mood immensely. This is the first week that my morning walks, hikes, and bikes weren’t in temperatures hovering at the freezing point, and I’m loving it. Rain or shine.

We’ve become afraid of the outdoors. We want a set temperature. I threw the windows open today and let the fresh air in. I’m rolling the windows down in the car when I’m not on the highway. I love the smell of the earth that’s kicked up by plummeting raindrops, I love the hush of walking in the snow. If it had snowed heavily I would have bought snowshoes this year. I didn’t even get to try out my fat tire bike in the snow!

I’ve thought about becoming more nomadic; I love to travel, so does Sarah. But there is something about having a place you call home. Even if it’s a weird ‘70s house in lackluster suburbia, I like having my chair to write this in, with Louie the cat curled up beside me, and shelves of books to choose from. That being said, I am planning a road trip this year to hike and bike around, to make me feel like a hunter-gatherer and also to appreciate having a place to come home to.

Here’s Chris’s post about 1000 hours outside. It’s not as hard as you think, it’s free, and the benefits are great.

A Lost Shivering Animal

1. I paid tribute to Angelina in my story, “The Cucuzza Curse.”