A Great Multitude Which No Man Could Number....

This is Grange Cemetery in Edinburgh - one of the more prestigious joints to move to when your time comes. Here you will find the great and the good of Edinburgh society - law, church, medicine. Here you will find Hugh Miller (the famed geologist), Thomas Chalmers who led the Great Disruption of 1843, Thomas Guthrie who founded homes for orphans, Thomas Nelson of Nelson the Publishers, etc, etc.

It is becoming increasingly difficult to secure space near to existing communities for burials. In some places in Scotland it is very difficult to find new ground. Research into who visits cemeteries suggests that 20%-75% of people, depending on the degree of kinship, never visits graves, but it is not clear whether distance to the place of burial is an influencing factor.

Re-use of graves has been suggested as an alternative to address the need to provide space for new burials. Amalarian tells me that in Tuscany you only get a few years before you get turfed out! In Scotland the current government consultations suggest a time more like 100 years.

So a personal ambivalence. Cemeteries are a wonderful place for an afternoon stroll - some of the best kept environment in any city. On the other hand, they are almost entirely filled with people for whom there is no one left to mourn.

Well - not to worry whether it affects us. As the Armenian/American writer William Soroyan once said when interviewed about his terminal illness - "Well, I've always known that everybody has to die, but I guess I always felt that somehow there would be an exception made in my case!"