WINSEN CEMETERY
In the late afternoon Heinrich, Elke and I went for a walk to the nearby cemetery. The sun was shining but we took umbrellas just in case. When Kathe died her ashes were placed within the Warren Wilson College cemetery under a gravestone with both of our names and dates on it. Whenever I stop by the Warren Wilson cemetery I look to see if the date of my demise has been filled in. So far it hasn’t.
As far as I know our ashes will be buried here forever with our gravestones there to let people know that we have been here on earth.
But in Germany, 25 years after the last person has been buried in a family plot, if you don’t pay a hefty fee for another 25 years you will be dug up and your family plot offered to someone else. This is what happened to the plot where Kathe’s parents and brother Bernd were buried. Volker, the brother next to Kathe in age was consulted and didn’t want to pay the fee and keep the plot, so before Kathe and I knew it the plot had been dug up and cleared. We don’t know what happened to the caskets and gravestones. Volker, himself, insisted on being buried anonymously with no cemetery record at all of him being here on earth.
When Kathe died I wanted her ashes to be also scattered in Germany. But I discovered that the German funeral homes have ensured that this is against the law. If you are cremated in Germany you have to buy a casket and put the ashes inside and have a full burial site, no scattering of ashes allowed. So when Susie and I came to visit several months after Kathe died with ashes in a plastic medicine bottle we didn’t announce we had them and spread them everywhere we wanted to: around the chapel where she was baptized, into the Aller river where her brother Bernd drowned and on the now bare family burial plot. We found growing in the burial plot a tiny birch tree which is where we spread her ashes. The birch tree is now grown to 10 feet high with shining leaves like silver coins blowing in the window.
So yesterday we went to see the birch twin birch trees that are the marker of her presence in Winsen as well as to walk past the other beautiful gravesites or people that Elke and Heinrich knew when these people were alive. Elkes mother and father and brother have stones, some taken from other cemeteries, now closed, where they were buried. Anna Kathrin, Elke’s daughter who died young, has both a marker here and in the distant cemetery where she was buried.
But what an American is struck by is the difference between a German cemetery and an AMerican cemetery. In the Warren Wilson cemetery all the markers with their names and dates are laid flat so that is easy to mow over them with a riding mower. There are no trees in the cemetery. But the Winsen cemetery is more a beautiful well tended garden. Many of the family gravestones are large with the family surname, there for all to see, with smaller stones for individuals. Each family plot is a well tended garden with gravel walkways, several non flowering shrubs and pots of flowers which are watered by the cemetery gardener. There are a variety of trees, often large towering trees, throughout the cemetery.
The cemetery is a beautiful, quiet, restful place where the dead are honored and not a grassy lawn with hidden stones as in Western North Carolina. A walk through the Winsen cemetery is a form of meditation on both the living and the dead. As we turned to return home, still meditating, it began to rain, harder and harder. We put up our umbrellas, got wet anyway, and returned home while the sun opened up again.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 