It is customary in our culture when we talk of family to be talking exclusively about people who are alive. However, in this we may be the exception rather than the rule. Many cultures practise ancestor worship, and still more give a great deal of time honouring the departed members of their kin. But we burn them, bury them and forget them pretty quickly in comparison.
My mind took this turn after last week when I visited the grave of my father, who died two years ago (he is buried in Wales, near the Hay-on-Wye literary festival, which I was visiting). My father would have been indifferent to this visit, such an English pragmatist was he (“When you’re dead, you’re dead” was his philosophy of mortality), but I found contemplating the rugged rectangle of slate that marked the hole into which I had helped lower him oddly satisfying.
I could not say wherein that satisfaction lay. I knew that 6ft under that spot was just a sprinkling of bones that had nothing to do with the living spirit I had known. Yet visit I did and pay tribute I did, with a handful of wild flowers.
This simple gesture is, of course, a shrunken version of ancestor worship – as are the family trees that adorn the walls of many families, and the faded black and white photos of grandparents that sit above the stairs (as they do in mine). In acknowledging our dead relatives – only the grander social classes have “ancestors” – we are marking ourselves out as part of a line; a line that in theoretical terms stretches back to the dawn of mankind, although we can identify only a very few most recent links in the chain.
I have sometimes asked of myself what my motivations were for writing my family memoir The Scent of Dried Roses, which traced my own family back to the beginnings of the last century. The ostensible reason was an inquiry into the hereditary and sociological reasons for my mother’s suicide. But perhaps the deeper reason was that I wanted to feel part of something larger than myself.
Our dead relatives – our ancestors – are part of the project in elevating us from anonymity and our own fates as soon to be dead relatives. They are exercises in identity, no less than protestations about gender, class and sexuality. They help locate us and raise us above the scrabbling, mortal primates we are. They are part of a story in a web of stories, but they are a part that many of us have forgotten to honour.
As it happens, I live close to one of the biggest graveyards in London, the necropolis of Kensal Green. I often walk among the fading tombstones, and I am struck by how unkempt and untended so many of them are. Many recent internments feature trivia such as beer cans and favourite cigarette brands and football regalia. Our honouring of the dead, where it takes place, is now often reduced to a memorial to consumer and leisure habits.
We cannot turn the clock back. We have lost interest, on the whole, in our dead relatives, as we continue the modern project of urgently denying death and asserting (paradoxically) the supremacy of science and secularism, which leaves us nothing to mourn except a few decaying molecules rather than a repository of meaning.
As for me, I will insist when I peg out that I am planted in that cemetery with due reverence and gravity. Like all of us, I am destined to be a dead relative and I want to be one with some style – no old DVD boxes of Breaking Bad for me thanks. Just a few simple flowers on my birthday – or deathday – and a little respect, so that I can carry out my posthumous job; to form a completed chapter in a never-ending story.
Tim Lott’s new novel, The Last Summer of the Water Strider, is published by Scribner on 18 June
