When I think about Death, it’s in quite a pragmatic way: Will I feel satisfied with how I lived my life? Have I made the most of it? What regrets do I anticipate and how do I remedy those before I die? What will be my legacy? etc. etc.
All the answers require me to live a life where time is never taken for granted. I get it, we don’t know how much time we have in this life. You won’t hear me say “I’ll wait to [fill in the blank] when I retire”. If I want to do it, it needs to be now, the present, it’s all we have. So I fill up my life doing those things that I love, making things happen, satisfying curiosities, and pursuing passions. Some days it feels like a race against time and I sense death gaining speed on me, casting its shadow which in turn propels me forward, even more determined to live large.
I know death will win the race, it always does, it’s an inevitable consequence of time. And when death happens and life is extinguished, all that remains is the matter of dealing with the dead.
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What happens to the dead is generally informed by the will of the deceased or an alternate decision maker and influenced by culture, period of time, religion, socio-economics, family, philosophy and nature of death.
Despite what may seem like a morose topic, I’m fascinated with the burial of the dead, especially from an international perspective. I have written an earlier GlobeTrotter blog post Tombstone Tourist that focussed on cemeteries in different places around the world and how the dead are memorialized with tombstones and tombs.
With the current death toll from the COVID-19 pandemic continuing to rise, the matter of dealing with the dead is being grappled with around the world. It’s led me to think of burial places, but less about what I see from ground level and more on what’s happening underneath.
Recently George Steinmetz captured the digging of a mass grave in NYC’s Hart Island for those victims of COVID-19. George is a renowned National Geographic and New York Times photographer and I’m a huge fan. Much of his photography is exploration of landscapes from an aerial perspective, creating images that you’d never see or appreciate otherwise. I hadn’t heard of Hart Island, but was immediately intrigued.
NYC purchased Harts lsland in 1868 and over the last 145 years it has been a cemetery for almost 1 million New Yorkers. Those buried on Harts Island include the homeless and unclaimed bodies; victims of the Spanish Flu pandemic; those who died during the AIDS crisis; and now there are burials for victims of the COVID-19 pandemic. Historically, burials were completed by inmates from the Rikers Island jail. Trenches are dug to stack coffins of adults 3 coffins deep in sections of 150 and babies 5 coffins deep in sections of 100.
Practically speaking, layering the dead is a better use of real estate, taking advantage of an opportunity to go deeper underground — subterranean. This is currently being explored in Israel where burial “towers” are being constructed deep under the earth with crypts carved into underground tunnels. Facing a similar space shortage in Australia, a Sydney cemetery is exploring the development of further underground burial systems in the form of catacombs.
This “new” burial system is in fact an “old” burial system, underground burial structures have been in existence for millennia. Catacombs go way back for both Christian and Jewish religions with the most ancient found in Malta at the Hal Saflieni Hypogeum.
The word Hypogeum literally means “underground” in Greek and the Hal Saflieni is a three-storey subterranean pre-historic burial complex. There are remains of more than 7,000 people in the Hypogeum dating from as early as 4000 BC to 1500 BC. Today, in order to preserve this UNESCO Heritage site, the Hypogeum is accessible by only 10 visitors per hour for a maximum of 8 hours a day to preserve the site. I was lucky enough to be one of those visitors last November, but unfortunately no photography is allowed at the site.
However, you can take photos at other catacombs and there are many in Malta — one of the more famous is St. Paul’s Catacombs in the once ancient town of Rabat. Used from the 4th to the 9th Century AD there are a series of passageways and tunnels with over 30 “vaults” of tombs within the complex spanning over 2000 sq meters.
Roaming through these subterranean burial places is like wandering through a labyrinth of interconnected stories—stories of lives lived in a different place or another time. Offering information that will be readily interpreted such as cause of death (e.g., 1918 Spanish Flu; 1940’s WW2; 2020 COVID-19) or a glimpse into the rituals of worship and death (e.g., the temple and burial chambers of Malta’s hypogeum).
These places where we bury our dead are not merely a marker of a body or a life lived. Burial places are communities, capturing a slice of time, moments of history, and visual exhibits surrounding the rituals of death.
To think, all those years ago in Malta could any one of those 7000 buried at the hypogeum have conceived that one day tourists from all over the world would travel to and pay for the opportunity to visit their burial place? And that a series of chambers buried deep beneath the earth would inform those who came afterwards of a prehistoric culture and society? It’s really beyond belief.
I find solace and comfort to think that when my life ends that I will form a community with those with whom I am buried. To think that one day my remains will be in a burial space where people may travel through and pause to consider the life it represents; the preservation of my life.
In my hometown, we have fared well during COVID-19 and have had fewer deaths compared to other provinces in Canada and internationally. My province is overall quite rural with a sparse population and lots of real estate for cemeteries that would negate any prospects of a future subterranean complex as my future burial place.
Yet, despite not having 5000 year-old burial places or 500 year-old for that matter, Nova Scotia is not lacking in interesting burial places. Join me next time on a new GlobeTrotter blog post as I explore my own province, what will be my burial community, and who’s ‘Buried Deep” in the veritable necropolis of the City of Halifax.